Book Reviews - Review 37

Carver's last collection of stories. Much less various in tone and subject matter than WYPBQ,P (q.v.): most of the narrators are middle-aged men with difficult marriages or relatives.

Carver had fully mastered his style by the time he came to write these stories. There is a broad sense of pathos, resignation and loneliness, which the spare style makes all the more poignant; there's never a hint of melodrama or self-pity. This really is writing in which "less is more", where the silences speak volumes, if you will. Highly recommended.