What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I first became interested in this book when I read Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Any book that can inspire Murakami to steal (most of) the line must be worth reading. Mustn’t it? Well, I thought so, though it took me some time to get around to this collection of 17 short stories.

The cover of the Vintage Classics version I read is sparse, and the blurb gave nothing away. Ah well, in for a penny…

Originally published in 1981, the prose is lean and the general mood somewhat disturbing as Carver explores the nature of life and love. As I worked my way through the collection, the stories seemed to increase in length and complexity. Many of the characters were not easy to like - many were alcoholics and adulterers – but there was a compelling darkness and variation that seemed to draw me, urgently, from one story to the next.

Mid-way through I came across a scene I recognised. I’d seen it before in a film I'd much enjoyed: Short Cuts directed by Alan Atman, in 1993. In looking back at the film, I discovered that Altman had based it on a group of Carver’s short stories. About Carver, he says:

His stories are all occurrences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn. Maybe the bottom falls out. Maybe they have a near-miss with disaster. Maybe they just have to go on, knowing things they don't really want to know about one another.

And this seems to be the essence of it. Life’s miseries are not sugar-coated here. The stories are uniformly melancholy. But overriding this is the feeling that as long as life includes the precious opportunity for us all to experience love, then maybe it’s all worthwhile.

I did enjoy some stories more than others, with the title piece probably being the most memorable. However, overall I’d say it’s well worth setting aside a short amount of time to experience this powerful collection. It offers a unique perspective on the human condition, filled with both darkness and glimmers of hope.

How are the stories? In one word - amazing!!

It starts with a hustle and ends with a hustle. There is no beginning, no conclusion. There isn't much more that seems good from the perspective of the plot. What the author has done very skillfully is the creation of realistic characters and their presentation as human beings with flesh and blood. I know these people. These forgetful, angry, scared, confused, suspicious, thoughtful, tortured, jealous, emotionless people are around me, inside me. If we were to talk separately, very few remarkable stories would be found, but the main essence of the whole book troubles the mind.

I am almost always late to the party. I'm not sure how it happens, but I often seem to miss out on new shows, bands, or books for a few years. Then, when I finally get around to them, I get extremely excited, only to find that everyone else is like, "Yeah, we know..." Case in point: I recently started watching "Shameless" (the American version) and became deeply emotionally invested in it. However, I can't find anyone to talk to about Fiona's poor decision-making or Ian and Mickey's adorable relationship because everyone else who cares has already finished season 10. This is pretty typical for me.

Watching this show about a family living in poverty in Chicago made me think of the Carver short stories I read last year. The squalor, the bitterness, the stress of survival, and the strange sources of joy and comfort were all present in both. The short stories and the show both evoked sadness, an angry desire to rant about social inequalities, and a bitter laugh at the maddening circumstances the characters are stuck in. I think the ultimate difference is that while the Gallaghers try to find some meaning and purpose in their lives, Carver's characters have given up and will simply pass the time drinking, playing cards, and fishing until they die.

This collection was even better than "Will You Please Be Quiet Please." While the earlier work of Mr. Carver left me feeling uneasy and a little stunned, this one just tore through me. I think there might be a little blood on my shirt. How he managed to make such bleak stories about people doing nothing so beautiful is truly amazing. And just like the stories I read last year, it wasn't the vignettes themselves that affected me as much as the aftertaste they left in my mind.

Many people have written stories about falling in love, and that's all well and good, but few people dare to look at what happens after the credits roll, when love becomes work, a challenge, or even sometimes a burden. The love Carver's characters have for each other is pretty messed up, but it's also visceral and uncomfortably real. When you used to love someone and you don't anymore, where did that love go? Can you love someone and hate them at the same time? I've asked myself these questions, and while I know that Carver might not have had the answers, he perfectly illustrated the universality of that pain. He doesn't even give you the fight or the reason behind the death of the love: just the aftermath.

I love that these little stories are so much more than just the words on the page. You have to figure out for yourself what happened before the first line. I think it makes the impact more subtle but also more painful. I will definitely be re-reading this one.

Stylistically, these short stories are incredibly remarkable, yet they are relentlessly depressing.

I chose to read this collection because Haruki Murakami counts Carver as an influence, and I can clearly see the connection. They both share a certain spare clarity of prose, which is quite captivating. Additionally, there is an occasional touch of beautiful oddness in their works. However, it should be noted that Murakami takes this aspect much further than Carver does.

While Murakami's writing often has a humorous side, Carver's is just bleak. Reading too many of these stories in succession can make you feel so despondent that you might even consider taking extreme measures like throwing yourself off the roof. When read in sequence like that, they also start to feel a bit monotonous.

Nevertheless, I definitely appreciate Carver's writing, even if I didn't necessarily enjoy it in the traditional sense. I think in the future, I will just limit my intake. An occasional nibble at his stories can be great, but a heavy meal of them - uh-oh, now you're going to need to lie down and recover from the emotional weight.

Milan Kundera, in his short story collection Laughable Loves, delves into the inevitable absurdity surrounding the much-misunderstood emotion of Love. It often starts with innocent stargazing but later tempts numerous meteors to shatter the fragile abode of lovers. Promises are broken, sappy definitions are torn asunder. Even when circumstances remain the same or change, the phrase "he/she still loves me" loses its significance. What is left is this dirty carcass of emotions. Some people carry it with them wherever they go, while others bury it in the most unwholesome way in the graveyard of their hearts. It's a laughable affair, yet filled with compelling stories that initially underwhelmed me. However, after reading Carver's "What we Talk about when we talk about Love", I reevaluated my reaction to Kundera's book. Now, I can appreciate it much more due to the few hazy intersection points I noticed between these two works.

In an instant, the sure-footed destiny trips, and a suffocating despair takes on a confident stance. This is because when we talk, we frequently fail to communicate effectively and rely too much on the unspoken. Carver succeeds with this book because of the minimal distance he maintains from the reality that defies the lofty motifs of life and explores the silent frustration of clueless humans. The characters seem to be the uninspired architects of some amorphous structure that showcases their clumsy choices. In their efforts to justify these choices, they throw around rhetorical questions and alternate opinions without any didactic purpose.

Each story implies a different concern rather than a direct reference to love, which gives uniqueness to this collection. This is further enhanced by Carver's minimalist prose. He often indulges a bit too much in the privileges of ambiguity, but it's hardly a flaw considering the wit and ingenuity that makes one want to come back and encounter the people who prolong their last goodbyes while taking every last thing they think belongs to them or to feel compassion for the young couple who had other plans besides becoming young parents.

Continuing from just another ordinary day to a deserted afternoon and slowly creeping towards an impending night, these stories occur everywhere as a result of some unnatural disorder that humans have managed to conceive. So, it's advisable to think and feel a little before we talk and listen.

I’ve read five stories so far in this book of short stories. I’m compelled to write down my thoughts long before reaching the end of the book, so this is like a pre-review. These are my initial impressions that may or may not change after reading the whole thing. So far, the impression the first story gave me has endured through the next four stories.

This book is by an author I’d never heard of before. However, it was highly recommended to me. After some online research, I discovered that the author is regarded as one of America’s greats, a master storyteller. As a writer of short stories myself, I was naturally eager to read a master I had previously been unaware of.

I had rather high expectations. I’d even been saving the book as if it were a special treat. I have numerous books to read and usually read at least one in print and one in digital format simultaneously. I purchased this one in print, and each time I finished a print book, I’d think about starting this one, but I’d postpone it for a more opportune time when I could truly savor it. The time seemed right during this 4-day holiday weekend.

I read the first story, anticipating the author’s brilliance. It began like just about any story, and then after a few pages, it was over, and I simply thought, “Huh?” I didn’t even understand how that could be considered a story. I read the next one, and it was the same. There’s a person, they do something, they say some things, and then it’s The End. By the third story, I reached a point where when I got to the end of a page on the right-hand side of the book, I realized I didn’t know if the story was over or not. There was no way to tell if it would continue on the next page because that’s how the stories are constructed.

Think about that. You can’t determine before turning the page whether the story has reached its conclusion or if there’s more to it before it abruptly and disjointedly ends. I started thinking about the Acknowledgements and how the author mentioned receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That made me think of Robert Maplethorpe and Andres Serrano with his Piss-Christ “art.” I began to wonder if Carver is just some semi-talented rebel favored by the left who is lauded simply because he blatantly defies norms. He doesn’t necessarily have to do anything truly brilliant as long as he goes against expectations and conventions.

I also wonder if I’m just not sophisticated enough to appreciate his brilliance, as if I’m standing in a museum looking at a painting like Whistler’s Mother and thinking, “Huh? What’s so great about this? I don’t get it.”

It also reminds me of something I read once about a professor of music who analyzed The Beatles’ music and described all the brilliant and sophisticated things they had done, going into great technical detail to describe their advanced musical genius. John Lennon read the book and said something about not even understanding what the guy was talking about. They had just written songs – that’s all.

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Okay, I finished the book, loathing the author more and more with each story I read. Each time I completed another nonsensical story without a point, I kept thinking about all the glowing reviews and how this guy is supposed to be the “master” storyteller.

I’ll give him credit for being able to vividly bring you into a scene and create realistic dialogue, but shouldn’t a story be more than just that? I would think any good writer must be able to do those things as basic requirements – but he has to go beyond that and perhaps even have a point to the story. It’s not enough to simply take a camera and zoom in on two people in the world, give us a few minutes of hearing them discuss some dysfunctional aspect of their lives, and then zoom out again.

I was also extremely irritated by his speech attributions, telling an entire story with the narrator saying things like: “I’m going outside,” she goes. I go, “Why?” “Because it’s warmer out there,” she goes. She goes, “I won’t be long.”

And in two of the stories, he used no quotation marks at all, and in one of those, a person within the story was telling a story to another character. I had to keep rereading paragraphs to understand what on earth I was reading. Was that dialogue?? I’d get to the end of some of these “stories” and want to tell the author, F*** you!

I wondered if this guy said to his best friend, “Watch this. I’m going to write another piece of crap story, and everyone is going to fawn all over it and drool as they praise my brilliance. hee hee.”

I also thought about how his writing could be compared to a painting. Imagine if someone painted a toilet, and the critics raved about what a masterpiece it was. I (and perhaps you) would look at it and say, “It’s a freakin’ toilet. What’s so amazing?”

“Look at the handle! It’s like the last person who flushed the toilet had an oily thumb, and you can see the whorls of their thumbprint on the chrome. It’s magnificent! And my god, just look at the shitstains! You can practically smell them. It’s pure genius!”

Well, now you should have an idea of what you’re in for if you read Carver. Maybe you’ll see his writing the way my friend who recommended this book to me does and you’ll love it. The guy has talent. There’s no denying that. I’m just not sure if he ever knew what to do with it. One of my thoughts about him was, “A government-subsidized wannabe Salinger.”

My final thought is, if I knew my worst enemy was a compulsive reader and was going to end up stranded on an island for the rest of his life with nothing to read, I'd like to fly over and drop this book on the island.

A literary portrait of the lowest and dirtiest part of the life of American couples and families of his time. Marvelous. Carver, a born narrator, tremendous. Realistic. The complex is born between his simple and just prose. Without adornments or hidden tricks. To the point, but always wrapped in a cloud that veils everything. That traps his characters and strips them of tranquility and leads them, little by little, or stumbling, towards the hostile, the uncomfortable. The dangerous. If I had to say something negative about his stories, I would say that his endings or, at least most of them, were not his strength, at least not for me. However, in general, I think it is a masterful book.

What do any of us truly know about love? In my view, we are mere novices in the realm of love. We claim to love one another, and indeed we do, of that I have no doubt. I love Terri, and Terri loves me, and you all love each other too. You understand the kind of love I'm referring to now. There's physical love, that urge that draws you to someone special, as well as love for the other person's being, their essence, so to speak. Carnal love and, well, let's call it sentimental love, the day-to-day concern for the other person. But sometimes I struggle to account for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. And yet I did, I know I did.

Poets, songwriters, and moviemakers entice us with their promises of beauty, happiness, and ever after. Are they selling the genuine article or a perilous illusion with their depictions of romantic love and marital bliss? Raymond Carver, at least at first glance, begs to differ. All the stories in this collection focus on pain, loss, and despair. They feel so real, so authentic, so familiar in the breakdown of communication, in the anger and deliberate hurting of the other, in the casual infidelities, the inadequacy of the physical act, and the loneliness that is even more poignant after sharing your life with another. Young lovers, old lovers, middle-aged lovers, illicit lovers are all captured by Carver, as if in a drop of amber, in the moment when they let their guards down, when their raw emotions shatter the lies, deceit, and complacency of routine and conventional relationships.

In the very first story of the volume, a young girl exclaims, "You must be desperate or something" as she dances under the moonlight in the front yard of a stranger's house, surrounded by all the furniture and household appliances that have been thrown out and abandoned. We are witnessing the aftermath of a painful separation, something revealed only in the silences and the unspoken words, in the debris of what was perhaps once a happy household. This pattern repeats itself in every subsequent cameo. People are defeated and abandoned by the side of the road, or they tear each other apart, drowning their pain in hard liquor or clutching at strangers, hoping that the physical act of love can somehow fill the emptiness within their souls.

I have read a little about the author online, and I believe he writes from experience. The stories achieve their sense of the "real thing" because he has endured the turmoil of broken relationships, disappointments, betrayals, and alcoholic numbness before putting his experiences down on paper.
A list of all the misfortunes and defeats depicted here might turn some readers away from picking up and reading such a gloomy collection of stories. But I have noticed that in each of them, there is a "time before," an age of innocence and hope when love was strong enough to push away the fears and loneliness, when the worries of the material world were left outside the private haven of the couple. So I would argue that Carver is not denying the existence of love, only the permanence of the feeling, its fickle and changing nature that makes a mockery of the promises of ever after.
Some of the short stories embrace a violence, a desire for destruction that I remarked on earlier in the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. They also made me remember the kitchen-sink dramas of British Cinema in the 1960s: "Look Back in Anger," "Room at the Top," "Saturday Evening, Sunday Morning." I could also mention the classic "Lost Weekend" since alcohol features in most of the short stories as both the cause of the troubles and the means of escape from the pain and loneliness.
I was thinking of doing a short description of each story, but I believe they are better read as a whole. They are only episodes of a larger story, symptoms of a modern sickness of the heart, each one just "another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies" as one of the broken-down and resigned characters exclaims towards the end of the collection. The result is a sense of alienation, succinctly captured in the title story: "But we were all from somewhere else."
So what makes Carver's prose so special, so powerful, so convincing? More than the subject matter, I believe it is the art of saying more with less. One of the stories is only half a page long, yet it is one of the most disturbing of all (Popular Mechanics). A single word, a single name becomes charged with all the weight of years of discontent and disillusion (Gazebo). Most importantly, it is the silences, the unspoken words, the empty stares and empty spaces, the slumped shoulders and heavy footsteps that leap off the page and reveal more about the pain of the characters than any other writer I've read in recent years, perhaps with the exception of Carson McCullers.
From the same title story, where two couples discuss what love is over a few bottles of gin, comes the conclusion of the exercise the author presents to us. Love is found in the strangest of places and often manifests itself as hate and despair.
I left for last another movie reference: "Shortcuts" by Robert Altman. The other reason Carver's stories were so familiar to me is the strong impression made by this movie, which was inspired by and written from Carver's stories, some of which are included in this collection ("So Much Water, So Close To Home" and "The Bath" being the most memorable), and others in volumes I plan to track down and read in the near future.