This review of Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is the third in my series of five short fiction reviews.
Carver is widely regarded as a master of the short story, a man who reinvigorated an old form and made it his own, churning out four volumes of short fiction in the last twelve years of his short life. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is the first of these. The second, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, made Carver famous, but many of the 22 stories in this first volume of work are as powerful and evocative as any in the writer’s oeuvre.
“Write what you know” — so goes the edict handed to aspiring writers. Carver always did. A blue-collar man from a broken, hard-scrabble background, he didn’t escape into a new world with his fiction but recreated the world he knew, to staggering effect. Carver’s signature style, the style that remade the form, is known as minimalism, but it’s a label he rejected:
“There’s something about ‘minimalist’ that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don’t like.”
But was it his style, or a style imposed on him? Only after his second book was released — and his fame was ensured — did it emerge that Carver’s trademark minimalist prose might have had more to do with the editorial style of Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor, than the writerly sensibilities of Carver himself.
Carver moved out from under his editor’s thumb — perhaps to his own detriment, as various posthumously published works seem to show — after the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and truly came into his own with his third volume, Cathedral. But in this first volume, the Carver/Lish dynamic is beautifully at work, the stories therein lean to the point of being spare, and more powerful for it.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is a collection of brief, unvarnished accounts of moments in the lives of ordinary Americans, moments that, through the distance lens of reading, are significant, maybe even because they are insignificant. These are people who believe life is going to get better, because it has to. Harry and Emily in ‘How About This?’ — opposites who have fled to the country to pull themselves and their lives together, and only been drawn apart:
He was reaching to light a cigarette with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.
“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.
Carver’s protagonists are broken people, or people who have never been whole. His antagonists are the forces he wrestled himself before he saved his own life by becoming a writer: poverty, debt, alcoholism, anger, self-doubt, failure.
In ‘Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes’ a father involves himself in his son’s social life, picking a fight with the father of another boy and in doing so, bringing his own son to tears. It’s a moving take on boys and men, coming of age and mortality, and yet there’s not a shred of sentimentality in those eight pages. This is Carver at his early, unfinished best.
‘They’re Not Your Husband’ is another standout. After bullying his wife into losing weight, Earl shows up at her work and encourages other men to “look at the ass on her” but is pulled up by her coworkers:
“He’s a salesman. He’s my husband,” Doreen said at last, shrugging. Then she put the unfinished chocolate sundae in front of him and went to total up his check.
It’s just six pages long but, like so much of Carver’s best work, ‘They’re Not Your Husband’ is a telling moment from a much broader story.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is easy to read and re-read, each story significant in its own right. Yet as a collection of tragic, comic, human stories, this book marks the remarkable beginning of a brief yet genre-defining career.
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