Raymond Carver's Minimalistic Technique at Its Best and Worst : "Everything Stuck to Him" and "So Much Water So Close to Home"

The critics of Raymond Carver’s short stories have paid much attention to the author’s oblique way of description, and this tendency seems to have been more pronounced since Carver published Cathedral. This is because the critics have become skeptical about the appropriateness of the word “minimalism,” the appellation given to Carver’s technique in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. To be sure, a close reading of these three collections of short stories suggests that his way of description has not always been unvaried. Rather, it shows an undoubted transition of his writing method. Adam Meyer has succinctly explained this process of change in Carver’s techniques: “If we look back over Carver’s entire output . . . we see that his career . . . has actually taken on the shape of an hourglass, beginning wide, then narrowing, and then widening out again” (239). By “the shape of an hour glass,” Meyer means “he [Carver] did not start out as a minimalist, and he is one no longer, although he was one for a period of time in between” (240). Given that Carver has undergone a change in his writing method, it is not so simple a matter to give evidence of what aspects have exactly changed. Looking at his major-press books of stories, only one thing is obvious: the stories written later are much longer than the earlier ones. This fact is quite obvious when we compare his three important major collections of stories published by Vintage Books, 1)Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, 2)What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and 3)Cathedral. In the first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, which is 251 pages long, there are 22 stories, and in the second book that has merely 159 pages, 17 stories are included. By contrast, the third collection, Cathedral, consists of 228 pages yet contains only 12 stories. The average numbers of pages per each story of these three collections come down to these figures: 1)11.4 pages, 2)9.4 pages, 3)19 pages. This comes across as a remarkable phenomenon, for the themes chosen by the author are almost always failed lives of people “in which divorce, unemployment, boredom, and paranoia exist as part of an everyday landscape: the inversion of the American dream” (Clarke 100). That is, the conflicts he depicted in these collections are invariably of blue-color workers and their households, but, in spite of that, the lengths of the stories have dramatically increased. Actually, however, there was a small-press book, Furious Seasons and Other Stories, published in 1977 between Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. We are tempted to compare the lengths of the stories in this small press-book, too, with the