02.Dec.2009 Raymond Carver and Cathedral

Ever since I read A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, which completely blew me away, I’ve been meaning to look for more short stories that could give me the same level of magic. Know that I was (or still am) not a fan of short stories, but I’m feeling much more positive after that ONE right short.

Not long after, I read about Raymond Carver in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. As Capote was American, I thought it might be a good bet to start with another American short story writer.

A quick search on my own website shows that his works were apparently twice nominated for Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Cathedral in 1984 and Where I’m Calling From in 1989. Cathedral is also listed in EW’s The New Classics or 100 Best Reads 1983-2008. Not to mention a bunch of other awards the author was getting.

A bookish conversation also led me to know that he is one of Haruki Murakami‘s favorite authors. Murakami has translated Carver’s works to Japanese and his latest book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is an obvious play of Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love short story.

Knowing all these know, it’s weird how I had never heard of him before.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Going back to my problem with short stories, it’s that apart from being too short and therefore usually fail to engage my interest, they are usually published in book format. I’m already exhausted just by thinking that I need to read every work in the collection even though some are bound to be good and some not so much.

Trying to break free from this barrier, I’ve decided that I should stop being such an obsessive-compulsive for no good reason. I don’t HAVE TO read every single story in the collection. Just randomly pick ones that interest me or educatedly pick ones recommended by some people, and move on with my life. IT’S OKAY.

So that’s what I did with Cathedral. There are 11 short stories in the collection, and I read 4. I also need to return the book to library soon, so the more reason to not force myself rushing through all of them.

I think one way to decide whether you want to read the story or not is by reading the first sentence or the first paragraph, since short story is … um… short, so the beginning usually is good indication for the rest of the pages. I’m going to share that with you for the ones I read.

Feathers

“This friend of mind from work, Bud, he asked Fran and me to supper. I didn’t know his wife and he didn’t know Fran. That made us even. But I knew there was a little baby at Bud’s house.”

The first few sentences exactly set the entire story. A childless couple is invited to dinner by another couple with new born baby. The dinner would change the life of the former.

This short was the one mentioned in Reading Like a Writer. I was intrigued by the brevity of the tone and the narrator. I’m not sure if I liked the middle part, but the ending was great.

I was wondering after Feather which short I should read next. Then I remembered that C. B. James has this project to gather 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die. So far he has up to 333 stories and a few of Raymond Carver’s are included. Hence I picked A Small, Good Thing and Cathedral.

Cathedral

“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died.”

The two first sentences set the entire story. It spans across of only one night in which the couple spend with the blind man. The fact that the title is used for the anthology set my expectation quite high. At the end I don’t think I really got it. The ending made it a decent story though.

A Small, Good Thing

“Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped on the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite.”

Again the two first sentences set the entire story. There’s a woman, a baker, and the woman’s child. She’s buying a cake for her son’s birthday. But before the party, the child gets into a car accident and must be hospitalized. The baker, unknowing to what happens, phone the house to remind his customer about the cake.

This one is my favorite of the lot. I don’t have a child so it didn’t evoke much emotion, but I can imagine it work very well for some other people. For me the ending made the best part and added stars to my rating.

Vitamins

“I had a job and Patti didn’t. I worked a few hours a night for the hospital. It was a nothing job. I did some work, signed the card for eight hours, went drinking with the nurses. After a while, Patti wanted a job. She said she needed a job for her self-respect. So she started selling multiple vitamins door to door.”

Unhappy couple unhappy with their life and their jobs.

At this point I felt like there is a definite pattern to Carver’s stories, at least in this collection. All four stories capture the mundane not-so-happy aspects of married life. The narrator is often the husband, and if not, it sounds very masculine. I think the minimalist prose makes it obviously written by a male author. Do you know any female author who is very brief and sparse in writing?

As you can probably see, I have lukewarm feelings toward most of the stories. But I’m quite happy that I’m left optimistic. I would definitely go on to find more good short stories and I would read more of Carver’s stories in the future, including his famous What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (which I just borrowed from library in My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides). Be assured that I would talk about short stories again in the near future. I start to keep track of short stories I read in my Books Read in 2009.

Coincidentally, the biography of Ray was just out on the 24 November 2009 titled Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. Check out NPR article on it:

“Confession. The first time I read a Raymond Carver story, I didn’t get it. It was so spare, so lacking epiphan—– I thought: “Huh?””