Despatches from the war against being ordinary.

What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond
Carver

(Vintage,
2009)

'That
morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That
afternoon she tries to jump out the window.'

Those two
lines taken from the opening of 'Gazebo', the fourth story in this
collection seems to encapsulate everything that makes Raymond
Carver's writing remarkable. They're spare to the point of emaciation
and the second gives a bleak little kick to the seeming hedonism of
the first.

The stories
contained in this remarkable book are despatches from the front line
of the war against being ordinary written by a battle scarred
correspondent. Carver's characters are people who have been hit by a
double blow, the first is being blue collar drones doing dull but
necessary jobs in an America that celebrates being exceptional above
everything else; the second is the consequences of their own multiple
bad choices.

The solution
is, more often than not to drink enough to forget their ordinariness
for a few hours and to fill the acreage of days that surround these
brief interludes of false release with a sort of gloomy persistence
in the face of futility; making lemonade to mix with their bourbon
from the lemons life repeatedly hands them.

Picking
stories that stand out is an equally futile exercise since the
quality of Carver's writing is so uniformly high. That said 'Why
Don't You Dance', in which he uses the detritus found at a yard sale
to examine the end and the beginning of two relationships; 'Tell The
Women We're Going', a story of the lifelong friendship between Bill
Jamieson and Jerry Roberts moves from Norman Rockwell style suburban
ordinariness towards a shocking and surprising conclusion and 'The
Third Thing That Killed My Father Off', exploring the destructive
ripples spreading out from a failed get rich quick scheme
particularly pleased this reader.

'Gazebo',
the story quoted from at the start of this review is also worth
reading. As with so many of Carver's stories the characters are
looking for whatever is missing from their lives at the bottom of a
bottle and unsurprisingly not finding it. It is written with an
understanding of the repeated self-sabotage involved that only an
ex-drunk could provide, but without the temptation to moralise that
comes with winning the struggle for abstinence.

The prose
style is sparse, carver doesn't waste a single word and his dialogue
is true to the rhythms and hesitations of real speech. Taken together
these things make Carver's writing the literary equivalent of a
piece of Shaker furniture, a perfect fusion of form and function that
makes something profound out of its simplicity.

Authenticity
is an often misused word, Carver could write convincingly about
people who had been pushed to the margins of their own lives because
he had been there and come back with the hangover. That made for a
life and literary career that were far too short; both though burnt
brilliantly bright.