Call If You Need Me and Demonology

Dear Tony,

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Twelve years after Raymond Carver's death is a good time to reckon with his achievement. My own feeling is that his critical standing is due to drop like a rock.

Carver wrote some superior stories, the best of which are "A Small, Good Thing" (long version), the erotic O. Henry story "Neighbors," the parental nightmare "Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes," and the sickening "They're Not Your Husband." Outside of those, to read two or three Carver stories brings one depressingly close to a comprehensive view of the whole oeuvre. Never has an author so lacking in range, so incapable of surprise, garnered so much kudos. Some critics admire his "claustrophobic vision." I'm more inclined to see his work as hemmed in:

1. by social class. With rare exceptions, his protagonists work dead-end blue-collar jobs and don't meet anyone outside their milieu. We needn't demand that every American writer be Balzac or Jane Austen. Some would even call Carver's class-exclusivity a laudable overreaction to the underrepresentation of such people in American fiction. (The claim is a cliché and untrue, but that's another argument.) Certainly it cuts Carver off from much of the raw material of the best fiction.
2. by mindset. Carver's characters interact less than normal even with members of their own class. They're solipsistic. At least half the stories take place in the resentment-filled well of one man's head. Many others involve a man and a woman pinioned together in the marital equivalent of a pro-wrestling cage-match, with the outside world shut out.
3. by subject. Alcoholism, divorce, and bankruptcy are big stories, but they're not the only stories. Worse, drunks, the newly divorced, and debtors are often ciphers, locked in rented rooms, out of humanity's reach.
4. by style. The characters, men and women, all talk like the narrator. The stories all tend to end pompously, with pithy-but-ambivalent lines that have the effect of punch lines.

Just for the record, there may be a 400-page volume describing itself as "Collected Poems," but I don't think Carver wrote any poetry that is worth addressing.

Maybe we could talk about some of these problems in the course of the week. Unfortunately, the book under review--Call If You Need Me--is not the most suitable vehicle for such a discussion. As a product, the book is an affront, an insult. It's basically the 1991 collection No Heroics, Please tarted up with five "newly discovered" stories that were too slender to market separately.

The late short story "Errand," concerning the death of Chekhov, was not much good, but it had given some promise that Carver might be privately branching out in a new direction. Turns out he wasn't, at least on the evidence of these five new stories. They're stereotypical Carver efforts, in an early stage of drafting. If Carver considered a sentence like "So when Leslie's children came to visit, Sarah always took a large and real interest in them and sat them down at the table and made them cocoa and served the cookies or pound cake and took a genuine interest in their stories" ready to print, then I'm F.R. Leavis.

The early stories included here are juvenilia, typical of what one of the better students in an average creative-writing class would turn in. Most ambitious is "Furious Seasons," with its stream-of-consciousness, its formulaic phallic and vaginal "symbolism" ("his hand closed tightly around the warm, hard thermos." ... "The apples are heavy and yellow, and sweet juice spurts into his teeth as he bites into one."), and the formulaic "daring" with which Carver broaches incest.

It's of some scholarly interest, say, the way "The Hair" anticipates the excellent, later "Careful." But a worrisome certitude that arises from looking at Carver's pre-canon works is that the late, spare Carver is not like the late, geometric Mondrian, or the late, limerick-writing Auden: He never mastered his genre's classical idiom before moving on to minimalism.

The essays that make up the remainder of the book are slim. Half are introductions to story collections, which tell little more than what's in the book. Half are newspaper essays. There's even a back-jacket blurb! (It describes Chekhov as "the greatest short-story writer who ever lived" and "a consummate artist.") All show Carver as an inveterate log-roller (that déformation professionelle of creative writing profs). His default mode is the rave. Leave that aside. Most unsettling are sentences like "This collection of eleven poems and two short stories from Syracuse University's creative writing program ... is a writing sampler from the program." One worries that, outside of a certain type of short story that Carver could presumably do in his sleep, he was not a particularly good writer

******

That is not Rick Moody's problem. There is no one writing today with more talent. At his best, he may be the best writer in America. He can do everything. Here's the problem: He works with a collage of styles and idioms, and he is at the mercy of his choices. ("Post-modern" has become a near-meaningless word, but it fits Moody.) Sometimes he chooses perfectly: The narrator's apostrophe to his dead sister in "The Mansion on the Hill" is the most efficient, the most graceful, the most moving way to describe her fatal car accident. The four-part "party topography" in "The Carnival Tradition" is an ingenious way of describing social isolation.

At other times he drifts into idioms unworthy of his talent. He resorts to a lazy, opaque surrealism generally affected by writers of half his gifts. (Donald Antrim, with whom Moody is--incredibly--often compared, comes to mind. See all of "Forecast from the Retail Desk.") Pastiche is a kind of parody, and Moody often doesn't know when he's not being funny. (See the worst story in this collection, the modern fairy tale "Pan's Fair Throng.") At times, sloppiness creeps into even his inspired passages. Moody seems to have an esthetic death wish. He is incapable of being an uninteresting writer, except when he stretches to make himself "interesting"--at which point he can actually bore the reader for dozens of pages at a stretch. At times like these, you want to shake him and shout, "Will you tell the fucking story?"

As you'd imagine, I like Moody's more straightforward second novel, The Ice Storm, better than his arguably more ambitious third one, Purple America. In general, I'm much more interested in figuring out what makes Moody sometimes so soaringly good and sometimes so jejunely bad than I am in rehashing Carver. Till tomorrow,

All best,

Chris

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This week, our critics look at the grand old man of short fiction and a popular younger author. Click here to buy Call If You Need Me, by Raymond Carver; here for Demonology, by Rick Moody; and here for an explanation of our format.

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