Why I ❤️ Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
The Books We ❤️ Club welcomes Tom Pendergast of Out Over My Skis
In the spirit of TBW❤️C—bringing you the books that reach deeply into our hearts—I’m mentioning
and ’s beautiful introduction to a classic of Chinese literature, The Dream of the Red Chamber. I’ve never read any Chinese novels (The Joy Luck Club is as close as I’ve gotten) but their recommendation is sending this one to the top of my TBR pile.
The Summer 1983 - Issue #8 of Granta was the original coiner of the genre “Dirty Realism” to which Raymond Carver belongs, described by editor Bill Buford as “strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music.”
Although I would hardly call myself a “dirty realist,” I definitely understand the wish to write about and understand “real” life, the things we can’t escape. Don’t give me princes, spies, and heroes—I’ll never be one—but rather, people facing the kind of challenges, triumphs, and tragedies that we might need a writer’s lens to understand.
This month, our guest writer,
, expresses beautifully how this kind of writing can land differently at different times of your life. We thank him for revisiting his own experience of this seminal short story collection for our benefit.-MTF
Carver writes about how desperately hard it is to make sense of life … and yet here he is, trying, somehow putting it into words, without ever claiming expertise or a sense of finality.
And here’s a recording of Carver reading his own titular story.
The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.
We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.
(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)
The next edition of The Books We ❤️ Club will feature
and his selection—Khalil Gibran’s The Madman.
Why I ❤️ Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
by
ofI first fell in love with the work of American short story writer Raymond Carver in the late 1980s, when I thought I could explore his work as part of my Master’s thesis on masculinity in 20th century American literature—and at the same time explore my own tendency to distrust emotional expression and sentimentality, and to bottle things up.
Carver died the year I started my M.A. in English, 1988, and in some circles was being acclaimed for reviving the short story form in American fiction, for creating a genre sometimes called “dirty realism.” I dug his work, and I wanted to explore how he, like Ernest Hemingway before him, dealt in both stylistic and emotional minimalism, using stripped down language to show how men processed their incapacity for emotional openness and expression through anger and alcohol and violence (at worst) and through a kind of noble stoicism (at best). It was an “academic” idea I wanted to explore, but I won’t deny that it was at the heart of my own identity.
All full of myself and my great idea, I proposed my thesis idea to the stuffy chair of the English department, Dr. Albert Von Frank, recently hired at Washington State University from Harvard, where it was rumored he failed to get tenure. “Carver?” He harrumphed. “Never heard of him. As for Hemingway, I’m not sure one should write a thesis about Hemingway, much less someone influenced by him. Why not find a writer more canonical?”
I was … well, nonplussed. But Von Frank, that stuffy old fart, ruled the roost around there, so I did something conventional—honestly, I don’t even remember what it was—and I got myself out of there and into a more enlightened PhD program, where I ended up writing the book Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950 (University of Missouri Press, 2000). On the bright side, ruling Carver out of my academic work freed me to love him on his own terms, and boy, did I
Carver was the perfect fit for a young man who wanted nothing of sentimentality or romance in his fiction. Carver’s stories told of people who lived hard lives, taking low-end jobs, drinking too much, and generally abusing those around them, even, maybe mostly, those they professed to love. But the difficulties in their lives were not something they could speak of, not in any way that made any sense of their experience. They just didn’t know how. So they found other channels.
In “Why Don’t You Dance,” the opening story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a man’s wife has left him and he drags all their furniture out into the front yard of their small town neighborhood. He arranges the furniture just so, and plugs in the stereo and TV. Returning from the liquor store, he finds a young couple, assuming they’ve happened upon a yard sale, poring over his record collection. He pours them all a whiskey and encourages them to put on a record and dance. But the boy won’t dance, so the man dances with the young woman.
“Those people over there, they’re watching,” she said.
“It’s okay,” the man said. “It’s my place,” he said.
“Let them watch,” the girl said.
“That’s right,” the man said. “They thought they’d seen everything over here. But they haven’t seen this, have they?” he said.
He felt her breath on his neck.
“I hope you like your bed,” he said.
The girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man’s shoulder. She pulled the man closer.
“You must be desperate or something,” she said.
She names the man’s state—desperate—but Carver gives us so little to go on. There is no back story, no explanation from the man, only the barest of intimations of the failed relationship that led to the surreal yard sale scene: “They thought they’d seen everything over here.”
Yet somehow Carver’s spare prose evokes the tension and the pain that led to his wife’s leaving, the sense of recklessness that led him to drag all his belongings out to the lawn. Using highly compressed dialog and minimal detail, Carver somehow reveals depths of pain and confusion. He didn’t need to name the emotions or have the man explain them to help the reader feel them. This was what great fiction did, I thought then.
This kind of storytelling abounds in the book, and in Carver’s body of work as a whole. In “Viewfinder,” the narrator opens the story by telling us “A man without hands came to my door to sell me a photograph of my house.” He invites the man in and looks at the photograph:
There was a little rectangle of lawn, the driveway, the carport, front steps, bay window, and the window I’d been watching from in the kitchen.
Why would I want a photograph of this tragedy?
Why is it a tragedy? Carver offers little in the way of explanation, only the increasingly agitated behavior of the narrator, who implores the photographer without hands—who has scanned the scene and intuited that the narrator’s family has left him—to take more and more pictures. Finally, as the man snaps pictures, the narrator climbs on top of the roof of the house and finds several rocks.
“Ready?” I called, and I got a rock, and I waited until he had me in his viewfinder.
“Okay!” he called.
I laid back my arm and I hollered, “Now!” I threw that son of a bitch as far as I could throw it.
“I don’t know,” I heard him shout. “I don’t do motion shots.”
“Again,” I screamed, and took up another rock.
Why is the man screaming? Why is he throwing rocks? Carver doesn’t tell us what the man is thinking or feeling, but the intensity of these last actions persuades us that the man is in a desperate emotional state.
These are desperate stories, dark stories. No one in them is admirable, no one eloquent or praiseworthy or lovable. But somehow I love these stories. I loved them as a writer, for they taught me how much you can leave out and still craft a story with real emotional resonance. They taught me you don’t have to name feelings to render those feelings sensible to your reader, if you write it well enough.
Carver is a master of compression, and of finding just the right detail to render the emotions in a story real. In that, he is a great teacher.
More than teaching me to write, however, Carver’s stories also taught me self-compassion for my inability to express the tumult of emotions that make up human life. Carver’s characters love, and they hurt, but they don’t express those emotions successfully, instead transforming them into anger and aggression and sometimes even murder.
The violence and the drinking and the abuse are the price Carver’s characters pay for their inability or unwillingness to process their own emotions. Carver doesn’t show us how to process them more effectively—given his biography, I don’t know that he knew how himself—but he certainly holds up case study after case study of how NOT to live.
It’s funny and fitting that Carver chose the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” as the title for his collection, for it’s truly a story about his characters’ complete inability to talk about love. Two couples sit around a table drinking gin when Terri says that her ex-husband loved her so much he tried to kill her, and that starts the rest of them talking about love … especially Mel, Terri’s current partner, who professes to know what love is and what love isn’t, and who goes on and on about love without making any sense at all.
His friends offer little help and how could they: they may feel love, but they don’t know how to talk about it either. Carver seems to be saying that the more we talk about something, the less we know what it is, the further we get from it.
“I’ll tell you what real love is,” Mel said. “I mean, I’ll give you a good example. And then you draw your own conclusions.” He poured more gin into his glass.
And then Mel goes off on a long monologue. I won’t quote it at length, but it goes like this:
“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone would tell me.”
He finally winds up.
“Mel, for God’s sake,” Terri said. She reached out and took hold of his wrist. “Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?”
“Honey, I’m just talking,” Mel said.
Talking. It doesn’t get him where he wants to go.
It’s stuff like this that I remember loving about Carver’s stories when I was a young man, and I assumed I’d be lifted back in time to that sort of appreciation when I picked up the book to reread it recently. So imagine my surprise when I got through the first two stories and put the book down with frustration and something like disdain.
Carver’s minimalism felt like a mannerism, a mere stylistic tic that enabled him to avoid the hard work at getting beneath what was really going on in his character’s lives. I was especially disturbed at his endings, at the way he wrapped up stories with an enigmatic quip that implied depths that may not have been merited.
In “Popular Mechanics” for example, a feuding couple fight over who gets which possessions in a bitter separation and end the story pulling on the arms of the baby they both want to claim as their own.
She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.
But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
What was this coy gimmick, this parlor trick? It felt like the ending to a bad crime drama, something so cheesy I would be ashamed to write it myself.
Books don’t always age well, I’ve discovered. I recall loving Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance as a young man, but picking it up again years later, it left me flat. The things that move us at one phase in our life may just not work in another. We’re in a different place. Perhaps Carver’s work felt fresh and new to me in the 80s and early 90s, but had been imitated so much that to read the original now felt something like a parody.
I almost set the book aside, sad to discover that I no longer loved it. But something beckoned me to give it one more chance, to open my mind to what Carver was trying to do, so I started over and read the whole book again. And by god, I found I could love it still, albeit in a more “mature,” complicated way.
Finishing the title story, and now having lived through 34 years of marriage, I realized that we don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about love, but if we’re wise we try anyway, try and maybe fail, and keep trying still. I could see this in the story years ago, and it still resonates with me today. I know now that words only hint at real meaning, they never pin it down, that we’ve got to live words like “love” for them to mean anything at all.
When I read Carver as a young man, the hard lives and compromises of his characters felt exotic, their reactions to their lives sad and confused but also oddly compelling. But now I’ve lived through my own hard times and compromises, I’ve treated people I love in ways that could not have felt like love, and I have, in my own way, stood on a rooftop and thrown rocks into the distance. Even if I no longer admire Carver’s style in the way I once did, I still feel deeply moved by the humanity of his characters and by his effort to express the ineffable.
Carver writes about how desperately hard it is to make sense of life … and yet here he is, trying, somehow putting it into words, without ever claiming expertise or a sense of finality. The problems in his stories are never solved. Language, implies Carver, is not futile, but it ultimately falls short of comprehending the mysteries of life and love. Try as we might, words fail. Our deepest feelings are ultimately inexpressible … we can only feel them. And yet somehow, Carver helps us feel what his characters feel. That’s what I loved about this book. Still do.
 | A guest post by
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Great work, Tom! Really appreciate the introduction to this iconic American writer, and the personal spin on how we never really read the same book twice. Thanks!
I've never read Carver as a male writer or a minimalist. For me he's always been about the effects of class and pain and struggle and inequality. How hard it is to express yourself, how all the agony of poverty and lack of opportunity creates anger and pain and aggression towards your own people, how the capacity to love is perverted by the powerful external constraints. All his characters are exhausted and broken and poor and struggling and unable to express the their true nature because of their circumstances. I've always seen Carver as a class voice and and a reminder of the myth of the American dream. Of course he was writing like this in the 80's when class was being twisted into yet another myth.