What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

I had never read the original collection of Raymond Carver stories, as edited by Gordon Lish and published in 1981. It propelled Carver to elite literary status as a short story writer and so-called minimalist. It’s not hard to see why this collection was taken as a cultural milestone and literary sensation. These stories hit hard and keep moving. It’s the world of the impoverished uneducated underclass, but the voice is sharp with wit and lively with close observation. I know there’s controversy around Lish’s editing, as Carver later published revisions of some of these stories in Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From, in many ways restorations of what he originally wrote. But this book and these stories all jammed together are so crackling good I’m willing to take it as a successful collaboration and leave it at that. We can see now that Lish was at pains to expunge all sentiment, and that sometimes Carver wanted to write sentimental stories. This very short book captures an exquisitely perfect moment that would not be possible to continue, this minimalism, without high risk of going obvious, arch, and/or empty. In retrospect, Cathedral was the only way forward. But for the moment these 17 stories are gripping, poignant, weird, and compulsively readable. For one thing, they set up a context where “Popular Mechanics” finally actually works. It’s the shortest piece here, a two-pager that is rather obvious taken on its own or in its longer earlier and later versions. Lish has argued he is the author of the voice of Raymond Carver. That’s not entirely true but it’s not entirely wrong either. He may be the author of perhaps the most pungent and perhaps the most heartless shading of Carver’s voice. Carver was reporting in from the front lines of the economic shifts and dislocations that resulted in Reaganomics and a hollowed-out middle class, on the ground watching it happen. Lish is there to throttle back the impulse to compassion. That leaves us with 17 shards of lived experience which ring true, every sentence. Divorce, alcoholism, lost children—they’re all here, showing us what it looks like and feels like in its bewildering reality. I still think Where I’m Calling From is the best place to start with Carver, and Cathedral is a necessary stop. But so is this one, with the long Carver-esque title which Lish picked out of one of the stories, renaming the story (one of the longest and best) and the collection. Carver had wanted to call it Beginners. Make no mistake, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a collaboration between editor and writer—I think that’s the credit Lish wants too. Ultimately a very successful one. Essential.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)