Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009)

Carol Sklenicka's biography of poet and short story writer Raymond Carver is very good, packed with research and interviews and inevitably nearly as heartbreaking as some of Carver's stories. It was good to get to the bottom, more or less, of Carver's relationship with Gordon Lish, which is surprising in many ways. It's fair to say Lish is almost wholly responsible for the "minimalist" tag Carver was stuck with by Lish's alarmingly aggressive editing of the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. Carver was generous and deft in circumventing the subsequent problems, but I believe he is still taken as a literary minimalist by many. In typical fashion, he was happy to accept the glory and evolve his writing from there in the limited time he had left. Inevitably, also, as biographies will, Sklenicka reveals the clay portions of Carver's feet. Some of this is painful to learn, such as the way he treated his family and first wife. He always meant well, at least you can say that about him. By the time he and his first wife were deep into their alcoholism there were incidents of domestic violence. Those things are less fun to learn. Still, Carver produced some great work in his 50 years on the planet. Calling him the American Chekhov is a reasonable proposition, although we should also remember Chekhov was a doctor, died six years younger than Carver, and produced about five times as much work. I don't know Carver's poetry very well (or anyone's), but I see his stories putting him in the company of Sherwood Anderson, early Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever, which is no shabby lineage. I look forward to reading all his stories and reading them again. At the same time, there's a slightly sour taste from some aspects of his life, particularly the way his first wife was treated in the aftermath of his death. Sklenicka appears to have no dog in any of these fights in Carver's life, but I did come away with somewhat dimmed views of both Lish and Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. "Money changes everything" as a rock band from Atlanta called the Brains once noted—an eternal truth and no less so here. But Carver was a great writer and always will be. This biography does a solid job of telling the story.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.