A Look at the Short Stories of Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, and he died 50 years later of lung cancer in Port Angeles, Washington.  I’m sure other Carver fans (and his loved ones, of course) would agree that the world lost him far too soon.  His spotty educational pedigree allowed him to do some teaching and lecturing in the world of academia, but he spent a good part of his adult life working blue-collar jobs to support himself and his family.  And the blue-collar world informed his fiction – in terms of both structure and content.  Carver’s stories are all short.  He wanted them to be written and read in one sitting.  This brevity was generally necessitated by his work schedule.  He wrote many of his stories while at work, during his various shifts.  And those stories are typically populated with characters from society’s blue-collar, working classes.  Again, he writes from experience here.

Carver’s writing style has been described as “Minimalism” or “Dirty Realism.”  His stories are typically bleak and gritty, and the experiences of his mainly working-class characters are relayed in terse, spartan fashion.  But what Carver is able to convey to the reader through this sparse writing is nothing short of miraculous.  The hopes, fears, elation, and misery within the psyches of his characters, and the futility, incongruity, banality, and peril inherent in the plights of those characters, is delivered to the reader by Carver in the most economical, yet comprehensive fashion imaginable.  Really, Carver tells you more with what he doesn’t write than with what he does write.  I have never seen more ingenious and successful use of innuendo, implication, and suggestion than Carver’s.  No other writer I’ve read comes close.  Carver makes Hemingway and Chekhov seem positively chatty.  In five words, Carver can tell you about the ruination of a relationship, the futility of a life, or the smugness of ignorance.  With seemingly no effort, and with only the most cursory procession of letters, Carver causes the prosaic to shimmer with depth. Simplicity looms before the reader with gelid dimension and menace.  Really, Carver is that good.

In the world of painting, the Italian Mannerist Master, Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), who is generally considered to be the progentitor of Europe’s fabulous 17th century Baroque movement, initialized a highly stylized form of chiaroscuro (light and shadow use) known as tenebrism (or Caravaggism) to infuse his scenes with heightened drama.  All of the passion, fear, deternmination, and turmoil his painted subjects were feeling was captured and relayed to the viewer through Caravaggio’s tenebrism.  Light and shadow alone conveyed all of the drama and told the whole story.  I consider Carver’s use of implication and innuendo a sort of written (or unwritten?) tenebrism.  Carver brings his characters to full, desperate life, and inserts them into their actualized worlds through the masterful use of just a few words.  He implies.  We infer.  And we get the whole picture.  Again, Carver is that good.

And the overall length (or lack thereof) of Carver’s stories is remarkable, considering the richness and profundity he delivers with each one.  Most are under twenty pages in length.  Many are under ten.  One of his most jaw-dropping tales is two pages long.  Remember, Carver wrote a bunch of these things while he was at work.  He had to think fast, write fast, and read fast.  These works are engineered to be quick reads.  Each one is a thunderclap.  Carver tells you a life’s story in the blink of an eye, using only a few more words than an on-line pizza order.