What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the  most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it  has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which  Raymond Carver became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued,toofamous,  at least for his fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other  writer similarly loved, imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense of reading pastiche. "A man without hands  came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." "That morning she  pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to  jump out the window." "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." What other  writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative phrases, no  one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true outcomes  of the American dream.Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can  make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with  no hands takes your picture--deeplyfunny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity,  his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been  told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided  again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my  heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we  sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."Much of what happens inWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Love(1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage,  cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of  his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To  say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much.--Mary  Park