They are menacing, as are the spells of quiet and tensed apprehension that characterize Mr. Carver's method. His effect, which suggests but does not in any way duplicate the effect of Harold Pinter, is a function of accumulation. No single sentence lodges in the memory, but, taken together, Mr. Carver's locutions, exact and suggestive as they are, insinuate themselves into a reader's imagination and provoke startling, even shameful, expectations. In his choice of plots and materials Mr. Carver is in the modernist train of Kafka. Odd and threatening messages come as though by magic through the mails or by telephone.
Strangers invade one another's lives and offer preposterous challenges to one another.
In the customary literary execution of such procedures, identities shift, characters are misled into taking enemies as friends, conspiracies develop or are, at the least, apprehended. Mr. Carver, by contrast, anchors his men and women, his children, even his dogs and cats, in stable identities. But any day I expected to hear from up north. I lay on the sofa and listened to the rain. Now and then I'd lift up and look through the curtain for the mailman.