While I do enjoy reading short stories, I’m not the biggest fan of making my way through short story collections, especially those by the same author. I can imagine that it’s because I’m so used to reading novels that when I go from story to story, I expect the continuity that comes with going from chapter to chapter of a novel. So I guess that’s why it took me the better part of three years to read this collection of stories by Raymond Carver.
This book, which is an anthology of his short stories, is a holdover from college, a purchase required by a professor in my advanced fiction writing class. I can’t remember reading beyond just a couple of the stories back in the late Nineties, but I did remember that my professor was trying to use Carver as an example of a writer who could fully develop very flawed characters, ones who felt more real than the tropes we were all definitely pulling from–or at least that I was pulling from because I remember having a terrible case of writer’s block that semester. A few years ago, I took a class on teaching fiction writing as part of my Master’s program and decided to take this off the shelf in hopes that reading some of the stories of a well-regarded writer would inspire me to do well on the required stories for the class.
All in all, I wrote one story that I still think might be worth a revision and one that I completely scrapped once everything was done (and funny enough, the one that I think is worth it was inspired by a Hemingway short story, not one by Raymond Carver) and I put the book on my reading pile, determined to get through it at some point so I could check it off my “to read” list.
Carver’s characters definitely are well-developed, although I have to say that he definitely calls upon the same types of people. So many of them are men who drink, smoke, are divorced, and might have varying degrees of success in life. I don’t know how much of a reflection of Carver himself all of this is, but the stories certainly explore a type of masculinity that definitely has a darker side. I guess you could call it toxic, to be honest, and while in many cases Carver is showing us how messed up these people (and their situations) are, he also gives at least some of them compassion.
It’s a story collection worth checking out of the library or maybe grabbing on the very cheap at a used bookstore (which may be the only place you can find it because it might be out of print), and it may be one that you don’t read all the way through. If you’re interested, consider these highlights: “Cathedral” (a story about a man meeting his wife’s blind friend for the first time); “So Much Water So Close to Home” (a story about men finding a dead body told through the POV of one of their wives that is fascinating and creepy); “Blackbird Pie” (a man gets a letter from his wife telling him she is leaving him, and his perspective is one of the fog of mental illness); “Whoever Was Using This Bed” (a couple gets strange calls in the middle of the night asking for “Bud”); “Neighbors” (a weird one about people spending time in their neighbors’ place when they’re not supposed to be there); “A Small, Good Thing” (a couple copes with their son ending up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries after a hit-and-run); “Little Things” (a fighting couple literally gets into a tug-of-war over their baby); and “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes” and “Nobody Said Anything” (both of which touch on fatherhood).
-Tom
You should read this book if:
1. You like conflicted, often damaged male characters.
2. You find stories with a sense of uneasiness intriguing.
3. You’re looking to get better at writing fully developed stories and characters in few pages (a number of these are pretty short).
It’s the thirtieth episode of Required Reading With Tom and Stella! This podcast, which is hosted by Tom Panarese (Pop Culture Affidavit, In Country) and Stella (Batgirl to Oracle: A Barbara Gordon Podcast, The Batman Universe) is two teachers talking about literature. Each episode, we will be taking a look at a single work, analyzing it, criticizing it and deciding if its worth its place in the canon.
It’s the twenty-ninth episode of Required Reading With Tom and Stella! This podcast, which is hosted by Tom Panarese (Pop Culture Affidavit, In Country) and Stella (Batgirl to Oracle: A Barbara Gordon Podcast, The Batman Universe) is two teachers talking about literature. Each episode, we will be taking a look at a single work, analyzing it, criticizing it and deciding if its worth its place in the canon.
It’s the twenty-seventh episode of Required Reading With Tom and Stella! This podcast, which is hosted by Tom Panarese (Pop Culture Affidavit, In Country) and Stella (Batgirl to Oracle: A Barbara Gordon Podcast, The Batman Universe) is two teachers talking about literature. Each episode, we will be taking a look at a single work, analyzing it, criticizing it and deciding if its worth its place in the canon.
As DC reprints Batman’s adventures from the late Eighties and early Nineties, we come upon a period where Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle begin to solidify as a creative team. Granted, John Wagner was still co-writing the series with Grant, but as we go through this collection, which features Detective Comics #583-591 and Annual #1, we see a lot of the elements that would make their work on the Caped Crusader so memorable. We have classic Grant/Breyfogle villains Ratcatcher and The Ventriloquist and Scarface make their first appearances as well as an outstanding three-part storyline featuring a villain named Kadaver and the creation of The Corrosive Man (whose touch melts things away). There’s also the first annual, which guest stars The Question and is the first part of a three-parter that crosses over into Green Arrow and The Question annuals that year. Unfortunately, those two books’ annuals aren’t included, which is one of my only gripes about this collection.
After nearly a decade, Justin Cronin wraps up his trilogy of books that started with The Passage. If you’re unfamiliar with the novels or have just started watching the Fox TV series (which is sitting on my DVR), this trilogy of novels is set in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been more or less destroyed by a virus that was used for experiments by scientists and the U.S. government and turned thirteen people into vampire-type creatures. Once they get loose in The Passage, the decimation of the human populace is swift and the story picks up about a century later.
My new year’s resolution being one of using and consuming what I have accumulated with an eye toward my mental health, I’ve also been thinking about what and how I eat and how that has an impact on my physical health. I’m 41 years old as I write this and it seems like my body has decided that it was finally time for all of the mysterious ailments and issues to come about.
As our mutual friend, The Irredeemable Shag, says, “Everyone has a Batman phase.” I think that Stella is still in hers. Mine started in 1990 and while I finally gave up Batman in the early 2000s, I’d say that its high point ended sometime around the middle of the decade. The comics collected in this volume are from a few years before my phase; specifically, they are the first several issues of Detective Comics in the post-Crisis DCU.
It’s the twenty-sixth episode of Required Reading With Tom and Stella! This podcast, which is hosted by Tom Panarese (Pop Culture Affidavit, In Country) and Stella (Batgirl to Oracle: A Barbara Gordon Podcast, The Batman Universe) is two teachers talking about literature. Each episode, we will be taking a look at a single work, analyzing it, criticizing it and deciding if its worth its place in the canon.
