Chapter 22 - Raymond Carver

Summary

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a notable revival of interest in the short story in America. And if there was one single figure who represented this revival and was the focus of this interest it was Raymond Carver. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938, Carver worked with his father in a sawmill and took other menial jobs (gas station attendant, hospital orderly) before enrolling in Chico State College in California. Coming from this backgound, he represents another of those periodic shifts in American literature away from the predominance of the East Coast middle class. He also represents a return to realism as a literary mode after the postmodern experimentation of Barthelme, Gass and others; a realism which owes much to Hemingway but which also gives the mode a distinctively new inflection, exploring the strange turns of ordinary life, the odd corners within the familiar.

Carver professed an admiration for the early stories of Donald Barthelme, but felt that the movement he represented had run its course and that his widespread influence on other writers (particularly students in university creative writing classes) was not always a benign one. Instead he turned to stories with ‘lines of reference back to the real world’: stories in a tradition which he saw as including Tolstoy, but above all Anton Chekhov (‘the best short story writer who ever lived’), who often wrote about a ‘submerged population’ (Carver echoes Frank O'Connor here) and ‘gave voice’ to the inarticulate.