Book Reviews - Review 392

This collection of short stories saw Carver's transition to his mature style. His protagonists have arrived in the middle of life with the sense that their best years are behind them: trapped in boring marriages, alcoholic, or smoking too much weed, they spend their days wondering whether anything better lies beyond the disappointment of their current predicaments.

Carver will often select a physical emblem for his characters' situation: an irritating peacock; a broken fridge; vitamin tablets; a horse's bridle. The emblem might be striking, but the situation is typically banally sad. The stories usually end inconclusively. We can see that nothing is likely to change in the subjects' lives.

In some of the pieces, disappointment and pain show the way towards something more positive, when suffering individuals encounter each other and discover their common humanity. "A Small, Good Thing" (the most substantial story here) is the tale of a misanthrope hurting others more than he knows; when he finds out the truth, he awakens to compassion and shame, and begs for forgiveness.

Carver is a superb stylist, able to convey a large amount of information on characters' states of mind with simple nuanced phrases in this vein:

It must be said that a few of the shorter pieces lack penetration, feeling more like sketches for longer narratives than self-standing works of art. In "The Compartment", a disillusioned father takes a train journey to meet his estranged son in Europe, but changes his plans, and we don't know where he ends up. But neither do we know why he and his son are estranged, or what the role was of the son - clearly hinted at - in the break-up of his parents' marriage. Is the father's point of view necessarily reliable? We aren't given enough information to ascertain any of these things. I suppose we are supposed to imagine the back-story ourselves, but that feels like a dereliction of the writer's task: he should be creating stories, not fobbing the reader off with material to write their own.

In two of the stories, Carver's adoption of a female narrative voice is unconvincing, which is a shame since the stories are interesting.

This volume has its flaws, then, but it also frequently exhibits the talents of an excellent short story writer at his best.