Artist:
josue rosales (Unsplash)
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By Raymond Carver (published 1989)
Genre: A Collection Of Short Stories That Put You In Places So Ordinary And Plotless That You Are Forced To Confront A Type Of Fiction More Intense And Wrenching And Riveting Than Traditional Drama: People Showing The Way A Mind Has To Work For A Human To Arrive At A Particular Point
Recommended For: Someone Who Is OK With A Story Being Neither Happy Nor Sad But Just Being Worthy
Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).
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I recently heard Marc Maron interview Neko Case. They were talking about childhood trauma and the idea of trying to relate to their parents, all of whom were young when they had kids. Eventually, the two of them landed on the impossibility of truly relating to another person.
“The only experience we have with the process of relating to humans is being one, and what help has that ever been to anyone?”
That’s more or less the conclusion they came to, and I get it. We’ve only ever lived in our own heads and even empathy is a just form of projection (I probably don’t have to tell you that most of our forms of projection are a lot less generous than empathy).
That’s why you don’t really see a lot of writers convey humanity on the page, because how could they? They can do emotional manipulation, sometimes very successfully, and they can couch important or beautiful or strange or mysterious messages in the emotions that you make readers stake in their characters or their scenarios. But triggering a reaction isn’t the same as conveying humanity.
I don’t know how Raymond Carver does it, but I know there’s some sort of slight of hand. It feels like his short stories don’t waste time telling you what his characters are thinking and instead focus on what they’re doing. It feels like it is all forward-moving action, like he is an unsentimental writer who doesn’t waste time laying bare emotion with indulgent run-on sentences. But somehow, in a fairly short amount of time, you feel like you know these characters at their core. You don’t necessarily know what they’re afraid of. But you see them being afraid. Or you see them pretending not to be afraid. And that’s relatable. That’s humanity.
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This particular collection of short stories has a rhythm to it, and it rewards you for sticking with it. You might think the first story or two are sad, and that’s a mistake because none of the stories really need to be characterized as happy or sad. What you’re getting, once you can really establish your footing, is a thrill. It’s the thrill of actually understanding someone. Not understanding someone because you know the context of why they feel a certain way, but just wholeheartedly believing in their real-time thought process.
As I made my way through the stories and searched for a throughline, I settled on a loose connection: All of these protagonists seem to have been broken in some small or large ways before we meet them. Rarely is the crux of the story trying to mend that broken part, but the brokenness certainly doesn’t make things easier. There’s a generous ambiguity to how that piece of them broke. It always seems perfectly reasonable to assume it was self-perpetuated conditions that led to a more fragile existence, but you do wonder if it was just regular bad luck. You meet someone else in their life who seems to hold a moral high ground and briefly wonder “Did they have something to do with the way this person is?” And you’ll know that question has nothing to do with where this story is going, but Carver gives you the space to ask it, because that’s what living an observant life looks like, asking questions and wondering.
Bear with me for a second because this story and this anecdote is a tiny bit gross:
There was one story about a man. The man was an alcoholic. We didn’t know much but that was made pretty clear, and his wife left him because of it, so he was staying in a tiny attic he was leasing, trying to get back on the wagon and failing.
She came to check on him (or more likely discuss a divorce or child support or matters of that nature). That late morning he was in the usual state of grumpy but optimistic denial about his prospects of being pointed in the general direction of turning things around for the good. Unfortunately, one of his ears was clogged with ear wax, and he couldn’t hear out of it.
This is something that had happened to him before, and so when his wife came over, she tried to help him deal with it. He was agitated by it, and it sort of consumed his semi-sober thoughts. In the process of trying to help him, she discovered his stash of champagne in the bathroom. We didn’t really think that he had a real shot at winning her back anytime soon, but this was heartbreaking nonetheless. Still, the discovery was barely a blip for him. He needed to get his ear fixed.
Now, this is where I tell you that this has happened to me before. The earwax part, I mean. My ear has gotten clogged with wax, and if it gets to the point depicted here, the doctor has to intervene for me to be able to hear out of it. Apparently, some people’s allergies just react by overcompensating by building too much wax, and there’s not much you can do about it, besides the occasional preventative drops.
I can’t tell you how jarringly realistic - almost traumatic - the description of this incident was. Not being able to hear out of your ear in this way is incredibly disorienting because you can barely, sort of hear out of it and it feels like air is being whistled through ever so slightly. Focusing on anything else is almost impossible. The person you love could be in your rinkadink attic apartment for the first time in months and it might not matter. The character was pleading with his immediate future in ways that I recognized with a sharp familiarity.
It’s possible that Carver also suffers from this random ear irregularity. That would be a simple enough guess. But then you’d be reading through a lot of these short stories and eventually come to the assumption that he’s one of the more interesting people that’s ever lived.
There’s just something in the way his writing conveys an understanding of the way action and thought aren’t in conversation. They are in concert. They happen at once, and you’re welcome to recollect them separately afterwards.
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As much as we named our only child after anyone, we named him after Raymond Carver, though neither of us would take it quite that far. We also named him after Ray Benson (of Asleep at the Wheel) and Ray Price and Ray Charles. Those three men could honor a musical tradition with a joy so pulsating that the “innovative” quality assigned to their legacies was not really a part of their own personal agenda. It was just the result that ended up coming out of joy added to musical history.
And more than any of that, we thought of this little guy being our ray of light.
But something about Raymond Carver’s careful observations made him a proper namesake. There are so many qualities you really want for your children because you want them to be good, but you don’t want them to hurt. I never ever want my son to be indifferent to the wrongs of the world, but an awareness of those things is a very painful thing to carry through life. Carver’s writing suggested you should observe everything and take on a day with respect for all the feelings that come with doing literally anything.
While I was reading Cathedral, I read Richard Ford’s remembrance of Carver, which was a beautiful essay. He wrote about him like he was the one writer who has ever lived who did not want to speak ill of any one else’s writing. Before his own writing was recognized for its greatness, he didn’t live with jealousy of successful writers, just an interest in meeting them at their level.
“Ray was good will’s very soul,” Ford wrote.
Reading this man described this way - this man who could convey human emotion without ever really using the language of emotion - be described so tenderly was jarring to me, in a good way. Just reading Raymond Carving being described as “Ray,” - how I refer to my infant son - made me feel vulnerable in a way that made me want to lay flat on the floor.
When my wife was more than eight months pregnant, I would technically remind myself, or she would remind me, that Ray was in the room with us. That’s observational. It’s an easy one, but you’ve got to start somewhere. What’s with you is always worth looking at and thinking about. The next thing can’t be observed until later. You just can’t relate to anyone with your head stuck in tomorrow.
RIP Todd Snider
Driving the angels up the wall in heaven
Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago, I wrote about Todd Snider’s 2014 memoir, I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like. Here is that essay. I had no idea that Todd was going through any kind of health issues at the time, but he died about a week ago at 59 years old. Most of my feelings about him are in that essay, and it goes without saying that his passing is tragic.
Here is Rolling Stone’s obituary of him. Here is a more specific farewell from Marissa Moss, an East Nashville resident, where Snider was the unofficial mayor. Below are some songs I think you might like by Snider.