What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Book Review

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (WWTAWWTAL) began my trilogy of Carver collections, which also contained Cathedral and Will You Be Quiet, Please, Raymond Carver being an American short story writer who was at his peak in the 1980s and who often receives the title of being the individual who revived the format. Carver focuses in on the blue-collar experience of everyday working class Americans in the North West, hence critic Thomas R Edwards observation that Carver’s world is one in which "people worry about whether their old cars will start, where unemployment or personal bankruptcy are present dangers, where a good time consists of smoking pot with the neighbours, with a little cream soda and M & M's on the side.” Carver has a minimalist style, writing the bare minimum for each of his tales, and this has two benefits. Namely that it allows the tales to seem further reflective of the individuals they describe, where there is little room for excess and great expense, and, in a more practical light, the tales are easily read in one sitting, making them rather approachable. Despite this, I did find Carver’s style one that took a little time acclimatising to, especially his rather ambiguous and seemingly unfulfilled endings, and even now my opinion on WWTAWWTAL remains rather undecided.

Carver as a writer paints characters that are heavily relatable in terms of class and lifestyle. For instance, Buddy the ‘common labourer out of the saw mill’ in The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off, and the protagonist of Viewfinder noting that ‘why would [anyone] want a photograph of [the] tragedy [that is his house]’, his life being one in dull suburbia, a lifestyle kept by many. Indeed the lack of a name for the ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ protagonists of Everything Stuck To Him reflects how their story can be transcended onto many. These characters are also relatable in terms of their choices and decisions, the wife in So Much Water So Close To Home deciding not to take a stand against the relative crime of her husband and instead being seduced to stay by her animal needs as she ends up making love to him. Many of the tales consist of this ‘physical…carnal love’ as noted in the titular tale, rather than its unreachable, perfect counterpart. Carver also uses colloquial language through the tales, a voice that many of the readers would understand and relate to. Casual phrases such as ‘I says’ and ‘one in the oven again’ litter the collection, furthermore, rather than following an unrealistic stream of dialogue, many of the speeches are interrupted by throwaway injunctions. An example of the latter can be seen in Tessa’s interruption of Mel’s heartfelt speech in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , as she reminds him that the vessels he talks of were in fact ‘called vassals’. Carver also makes a comment on how closed off the human race is, many of his characters refusing to reveal their true emotions and instead dodging questions as regards to their mental state. Examples of this include the main personage of I Could See The Smallest Things noting that she ‘didn’t have any more thoughts except the thought that [she] had to hurry up and sleep’ rather than consider the events that have just unfolded, equally in Sacks the protagonist says to their father ‘everyone’s fine’… ‘which was not true’.  The awkward, vacant, dried up conversation in this tale is especially notable.

“Here we are” I said.

“Well, yes”, he said.

I shrugged and said “yes”.

At first I found this rather infuriating, Carver merely scratching the surface many times, but then I began to question whether I myself would differ from any of the characters and sadly the answer was no. Therefore Carver’s choice of such a style is merely reflecting the majority of individuals on the planet, furthering his sense of portraying real life. All these previous areas also make Carver’s tales all the more powerful as the sense of real people being portrayed is accentuated and hence they become more applicable, relevant and intriguing.

A frequent theme running through the collection is the destruction and ending of relationships, often due to infidelity on the part of one half of a couple. In the rare occasions that Carver paints a picture marital bliss it is made clear that this happiness will only be temporary. For instance in Everything Stuck To Him it is noted that ‘everything else…was outside for a while anyway’ though the troubles that will eventually place a heavy strain on the relationship are slowly burrowing their way inwards. Carver frequently conveys a sense of boredom in marriage, something none the more evident in the ending three lines of Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit…

“Honey”, I said to Myrna the night she came home.

“Let’s hug awhile and then you fix us a real nice supper.”

Myrna said “wash your hands”.

…in which the cold, clinical tone of the last line reflects the dull, tense situation the husband and wife now find themselves in. The sense of boring continuation is also reflected in how the wife, Myrna, is quickly redirected back to her usual duties in the kitchen. Further boredom is suggested in So Much Water So Close To Home in which the protagonist’s husband is suggested as ‘eat[ing] with a good appetite’ despite not being ‘hungry’. This illustrates a sense of gluttony merely for the purpose of filling the emotional void in the marriage. Marriage decay and marital conflict often takes the centre of Carver’s stories. This is illuminated in Gazebo in which the physical decay of the hotel owned by the main couple (the pool being noted as ‘fill[ing] up with a green gick so that the guests wouldn’t use it any more’) coincides with the spiritual decay of their relationship, thus emphasising it. Equally a deep sense of trust being lost is conveyed in A Serious Talk when the wife instructs the husband to ‘hang up [from the phone in the kitchen] when [she] says’, not wishing him to have an insight into her private life, whilst in So Much Water So Close To Home the wife ‘rakes [her] arms across the drawboard…send[ing] the dishes to the floor’, further accentuating this sense of destruction. The previous examples are pretty disturbing, but the ‘award’ as it were for the most desperate image of marital decay clearly goes to the tale Popular Mechanics, as illustrated in the following section…

‘Let go of him [the baby], he said.

Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said.

I’m not hurting the baby, he said.

The kitchen window gave no light. In the near dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm…’

This shocking and intense description of a physical struggle for the baby, the one shining gem of home from an otherwise battered and dead marriage, is a startling display for the reader, with powerful effect. The two individuals involved are made into mere animals, primitively fighting over this one precious possession. Much of the time the main reason for this aforementioned decay is infidelity, something that frequently crops up in the tales whether it be an affair with ‘a Stanley Products woman’ as in Sacks or the devastating affair of Gazebo. As it is so often the male partner that partakes in the affair in these tales perhaps Carver is making a comment on the male sex as a whole, this being something that will be explored in the next paragraph.

Carver portrays his male characters often in a rather negative light. Men are made to seem abusive, simplistic, predatorial and narrow minded, each of these traits being something I will explore in this section. Firstly, as aforementioned, the frequent infidelity in the tales is often due to the male partner, and the following quote from Sacks seems to suggest that this is a fault with the male gender as a whole.

‘A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.’

This seems to suggest that infidelity is almost programmed into the male sex, it being impossible for a man to cling on to fidelity once he has been tempted to do otherwise. Carver also paints many of his males in a predator-like, simplistic light. For instance in So Much Water So Close To Home the female protagonist notes a nearby driver as ‘look[ing] at [her] breasts, [her] legs’ whilst in Tell The Women We’re Going Out the protagonist Jerry begins an ambush on two female cyclists passing by. The last tale takes a darker light as Jerry stones both girls at the end as they don’t respond to his coming on, this being one of many shocking male acts of violence throughout the collection that also include the threatening husband of One More Thing and the destructor of A Serious Talk who ‘saws’ through the phone cord before ‘revers[ing]’ his car into his ex’s house. Men are also portrayed as extremely narrow minded by Carver, for instance in Everything Stuck To Him the husband refusing to abandon a trip to help his clearly struggling wife with childcare as ‘Carl’s planning on [him] going’. The most blatant case of narrow-mindedness however has to be that of So Much Water So Close To Home in which the husband, along with a band of his mates, decide to leave a dead body they found in the water and worry about it at the end of their trip. Thus they go on

‘cook[ing] fish, cook[ing] potatoes, [drinking] coffee…[before taking] their cooking things and eating things back down to the river and wash[ing] them where the girl was’.

This brutal insensitivity and selfishness is rather startling to read and even more worryingly, as Carver portrays, it seems to start from a young age, perhaps being ingrained in the male psyche. This is seen in The Bath when a young boy, having just seen his friend get hit by a car, thinks the following thoughts:

‘he was wondering if he should finish the rest [of the potato chips] or continue on to school.’

Overall, Carver’s depiction of men thus is clearly very negative, the women of the collection, in contrast, often taking the moral high ground and acting as the victims. Men are portrayed as being closest to our evolutionary ancestors in terms of their ‘survival of the fittest-esque’ and primitive behaviour, indeed Carver’s dismal view towards the male gender has definitely made me check my one ways and whims, hoping to escape from the stereotype he draws up.

Carver also touches on the subject of mental illness in the collection, perhaps most noticeably in After The Denim in which the husband is evidently an incredibly unstable individual, prone to OCD and showing some rather autistic behaviour. As the vignette, as it were, reaches its end we are left with the rather upsetting observation that he ‘felt unworthy to be listening, to be standing’, this being suggested as being a regular occurrence. Indeed, many of the mental breakdowns and abusive displays previously discussed are seen as momentary lapses in a continual stream of uninterrupted boredom and unhappiness. Carver’s presentation of alcohol in the tales is also rather interesting, he having been an alcoholic for a long part of his life. It is primarily painted as a tool for destruction as seen in Gazebo where it is noted that ‘all of [the couple’s] important decisions have been figured out when [they] were drinking’ and I Can See The Small Things in the line ‘Sam and Cliff used to be friends, then one night they got drinking…’. Furthermore many of the marital conflicts precedently described occur under the influence, for example in One More Thing ‘L.D. [is] found dunk again’ before his ensue of violence commences. Conversely, alcohol is also portrayed as a means to achieve emotional numbness, hence the decision in So Much Water So Close To Home to ‘pick up some beer’.

As I earlier stated, the greatest difficulty I found in acclimatising to Carver’s style was not his minimalistic, plain writing style, but the ambiguous endings and sporadic titles that label his work. The prime example of an unfulfilled ending comes from the first story Why Don’t You Dance as seen  in the following extract.

‘She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time she quit trying.’

I found this ending particularly insufficient as the girl fails to fully gain an understanding of the bizarre actions of the protagonist to the tale and it seemed all too abrupt for me, indeed the word ‘trying’ itself seems rather mid-sentence and incomplete. The choice of title’s was equally frustrating for me to start with too, examples such as Everything Stuck To Him seeming to have little relation to the actual meaning and content of the tale itself. However, as critic Mars-Jones suggests:

"Endings and titles are bound to be a problem for a writer like Carver, since readers and reviewers so habitually use them as keys to interpret everything else in a story. So he must make his endings enigmatic and even mildly surrealist, and his titles for the most part oblique. Sometimes he over-compensates."

Indeed, although at first look being frustrating and seemingly bizarre I gradually got used to and began to appreciate the effect of both the abrupt endings and titles, beginning to see the irony in many of them, for instance Popular Mechanics describing the struggle of force over the baby and Tell The Women We’re Going emphasising how the horrific events described very much are those done by the male sex. Equally the clinical and neutral ending to the horrific show of force and violence in Popular Mechanics provided some mirth, the ending being ‘in this manner the issue was decided’.

Thus, to conclude, I by no means deny the fact that I found What We Talk About When We Talk About Love a struggle at first, Carver’s style being something that took a while getting used to and eventually somewhat appreciating. Although my opinion on Raymond Carver remains undecided, I still find much praise for the powerful nature of the pictures he paints; accentuated by the characters and tales being so relatable and believable and I look forward to starting another one of his collections some time soon.