Raymond Carver: I Am A Man, And I Am Depressed

I fully admit I picked this book because of Birdman — it lived up to the existential angst and low-key insanity.

I’m not usually a short story person, as a writer or as a reader. I like the meaty stuff (lookin’ at you, Hanya Yanagihara). I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this Carver collection, and less pleasantly surprised by how quickly it got into my head.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a short story collection centered on a depressing look at America.

Published in 1981, What We Talk About captures the post-70s depression of falling out of love with your spouse, cheating (or being cheated on), and drinking yourself to death. America, right?

There are 17 short stories in the collection, ranging from a couple of pages to a sizable book chapter in length. I’m going to break from my usual system here to call out a few of the stories I found particularly compelling, as well as a couple that I felt didn’t work for one reason or another.

The Victories

Where Raymond Carver succeeds is in his treatment of marital depression, alcoholism, and the general malaise of picket fence America.

Tell the Women We’re Going

This one had a great surprise ending (spoilers ahead). Bill and Jerry, best friends since childhood, grow up at approximately the same speed, marrying and having children and otherwise living the white picket fence American ideal. However, a few years into their respective marriages, Jerry starts to get glum. To try and cheer him up, Bill takes him out to play pool and chat up some young women on the drive home.

The girls ride the line between flirting and wanting the men to go away, and eventually Jerry and Bill follow the girls to their picnic spot. There’s an insinuation that the men are going to rape the girls, but instead, Jerry grabs a rock and beats them both to death. The ending was totally out of left field, but at the same time, Carver left enough hints of Jerry’s unhappiness and desire for something new that the act didn’t seem entirely out of character, even though it was still completely insane.

Gazebo

I loved this story, although it was one of the more depressing ones in a collection of very depressing stories. A husband and wife motel-running team shut down the office and lock themselves in a hotel room, crying and drinking while they discuss the husband’s cheating with one of the cleaning women and the inevitable end of their marriage.

This one got me — the very realistic interpretation of the end of a relationship, when all you want to do is drink and cry, but you still can’t help imagining all the ways you thought your relationship was going to end (certainly not like this, as Duane bemoans). I also liked the depiction of Duane’s extramarital relations. It wasn’t this passion-fueled sex-fest the way a lot of narrative cheating expeditions are described. Instead, it was just sneaky sex, and Holly finding out about it ruined the magic—as well as the marriage, which was on its way out anyway.

The Bath

All right, this one was my favorite in the collection. And it was probably the biggest bummer! Seems to be a theme, right?

The storyline of this one (which should have been called “The Cake”, in my opinion) follows the parents of Scotty, a little boy hit by a car on his birthday. The mother has placed an order for his birthday cake, which the parents understandably forget about in order to rush to the hospital to care for Scotty, who has fallen into a coma. The father goes home to take a bath, but the phone startles him out of it — it’s the baker, calling to demand payment for the cake no one picked up. The father tells him off, before returning to the hospital. The parents switch places to watch over Scotty, and the mother goes home to take her own R&R break. Except—you guessed it—the baker calls back again.

I thought this one was really clever. It was a great example of not knowing what other people are going through at any given time, since the parents and the baker were experiencing their own emergencies. The baker had a cake that never got picked up, the parents have a child who may never wake up from his coma. The closing line (“Yes, it’s about Scotty,” from the baker on the phone) made me laugh out loud, but it was a very dark laugh—it seemed to sum up Raymond Carver perfectly.

The Less Successful

The three stories that “pulled me out” of the narrative experience all shared one thing in common: they didn’t go anywhere.

Viewfinder

In “Viewfinder,” for example, a man with hooks for hands offers photographs of the narrator’s house for sale. The unlikely pair run around the house taking posed pictures, and then the story just—ends.

There was probably some deeper meaning to it that just went totally over my head (I was too busy wondering why a guy with hooks for hands takes photos, and what happened to his hands in the first place), so it felt like whatever Carver was setting up didn’t actually fall into place by the end of the story.

After the Denim

“After the Denim” suffered the same issue: an elderly couple go to play bingo and the husband gets extremely pissed off at a young denim-wearing couple who cheat at the game and then go off to celebrate winning the jackpot. Meanwhile, the much more compelling story is the wife’s unnamed illness (alluded to be ovarian cancer) but I got lost in James’s annoyance with the young couple.

I suppose that was the point — don’t cheat at bingo because everyone else in the room has worse problems than you do. At the same time, this one just didn’t grip me as much as the other stories do. Most of them have extremely sleazy narrators, but they still have something you can identify with. James just annoyed me, unfortunately.

The Calm

This one I didn’t get at all. A group of men sit in a barber shop and one of them tells a hunting story — one man makes a comment another doesn’t like, and suddenly they’re all at each other’s throats and ready to throw hands.

But to me, the comment the guy made wasn’t worth getting upset about in the first place, and the narrative made no sense whatsoever. Why are we at a barber shop if the story is about a hunting trip? Why did the guy get so angry? And like the other two stories I didn’t “get,” this one ends abruptly with no resolution.

Closing Thoughts: Wow, that was depressing, but also pretty awesome

I enjoyed this short story collection way more than I thought I would. It was extremely depressing, for one, but it was also strangely compelling. The depictions of real-life, crusty Americana felt more realistic and engaging to me than many more “literary” short stories.

For the most part, these stories were character studies — alcoholics, cuckolds and cheaters, people who have given up. I don’t know how many were echoes of Carver’s own life, and how many were just made up of observations of other unhappy people around him. Whatever the source, the impact was impressive. I won’t write off Carver in the future.