Call If You Need Me and Demonology
I'm with you, Tony. I'm with you so much that I wonder if we're not just ciphers, interchangeable members of the "Moody Generation," that bloody crossroads where the verb squander and the direct object potential meet. "Fahnstock" left the same worry with me that it left with you--that perhaps one was too close to Moody's subject matter to judge him. (If Wilkie Fahnstock's cassette collection were ever lost, it could be pretty much regenerated from my collection of LPs and CDs.)
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StumbleUponI first had this feeling when reading Moody's preface to the paperback edition of his first novel, Garden State. He wrote of his obsession with the Feelies' album Crazy Rhythms, which he'd first heard on Boston's WBCN (oracle of my youth). I myself listened to that album night after night my junior year in college, at full-blast on one of those systems where plugging in the headset turned off the speakers, and unplugging it turned them back on. Most nights, I'd inadvertently jerk the cord out when I pitched onto the carpet around 3 a.m., simultaneously passing out into a sound sleep and waking up the other 23 residents of my entryway. So I was not only sampling the Fahnstock Selection, I was using the Fahnstock Method.
That said, I don't think my criticism of Carver's class-boundness can be applied to Moody. Every writer's perspective is to some extent determined by his class, or his way of life. But Carver's characters are to an unusual degree sealed off from people who are in any way unlike them. You seldom meet their bosses or their enemies, and their friends are unproblematically similar to them. When a lesbian and a black Vietnam vet appear in Carver's excellent story "Vitamins," it's almost shocking. For all the easy clichés about the "raw," "Western" quality of Carver's stories, the infrequency with which his characters are challenged by social newness makes them rather tame. Nobody enters a Carver story like a cyclone.
By contrast, Moody's characters frequently rub up against foreign situations, exotic dilemmas, and people their experience has in no way prepared them to understand. The best example in this book comes from "The Carnival Tradition." It's the weird rooftop encounter between the yuppie dancer M.J. and the Hispanic crack house kid with the "spectacular Caravaggio mug" whom she thinks of as "Angel" (real name: Mike). He agrees to help her get into her locked house, and then makes his move. I don't usually use "disturbing" as term of esthetic approval, but Moody's description of the way their embrace veers from consensual sex to near-rape is something else. Another example, later in the story, is Gerry's attempt, while wandering around a party, to buttonhole a black servant about how it feels to be a "staff person." ("You should mind your own business," she replies.)
Now, at the risk of unnecessarily throwing down a gauntlet, I'd say it would matter less even if Moody's work were sealed off the way Carver's is. That's because the world of "over-educated people from the suburban Northeast" is simply more important than Carver's world, if only by virtue of having been civilized by the prior observation of other writers, from Hawthorne and Melville to Cheever and Updike. Maybe that sounds snobbish, but as some Brit--Auberon Waugh, maybe--put it, snobbery is the belief that interesting people are more interesting than uninteresting people.
And maybe that's why Moody gets compared so often to Cheever. I'd never seen much of Cheever in Moody's work until part two of "Carnival," but there's plenty there. First, in the story's nice evocation of high WASP barbarism (on Halloween, Mr. Foster buys foam and toilet paper and other supplies in hopes his guests will vandalize nearby houses). Second, in the eye for social awkwardness, as when Gerry gets trapped in conversation with the Dune-reading loner Dinah Polanksi, who was "always closing in to a range of 12 to 14 inches, a distance more frequently associated with conversational styles of Mediterranean nations. He could see a patch of dermatitis on her brow. She was in need of a cream of some kind." Third, in the many-layered evocation of isolation amidst gaiety that I mentioned a couple days ago.
I cannot end this exchange without: 1) steering readers to a paragraph (pp. 68-69) in "The Double Zero" (a story I otherwise don't like much) that describes the stupidity, sexual habits, and herd instinct of ostriches. It may be the funniest passage I have read by a living writer. And 2) congratulating you for your superb classification of Barth and Pynchon as "High Paranoid."
It's always fun, Tony,
Chris
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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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Defenders of Carver were out in force, here, and here (plus advice on why not to read single-author short story collections) and here. Nice thread comparing Carver with Bukowski here: "For the record, Bukowski is just as awful a poet as Carver". Why is mediocre genre fiction so much better than mediocre literary fiction? Follow the thread here.]
Indeed, Carver's work generally involves working-class characters, often trapped in depressing lives. I don't see this as a limitation to his work, however. In the first place, I think that you're quite wrong to claim that the underrepresentation of blue collar America in our fiction is a fallacy. How many pre-Carver fiction writers can you name who address this substantial part of our population? However, to me your point is moot anyway. Do we fault Fitzgerald for his interest in upper class whites? Wright for his focus on poor blacks? Faulkner? Hemingway? Your supposed "limitation" has dismissed almost every major American writer. I would counter that Carver's work, like that of his contemporaries in the American canon, crosses boundaries of gender, race and socio-economic class. I may be a young, single man occupying the upper-middle class, but I can feel the marital desperation in Neighbors, and the adolescent confusion of Nobody Said Anything.
To say that Carver's work is limited by negativity of subject/mindset is again a misinformed assertion. I agree that much of Carver's published work is rather bleak--particularly the stories published in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. However, this negative tendency is more the legacy of Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, than of Carver himself. After Carver finally rejected Lish in 1984, his work grew in scope and sensitivity with the publication of Cathedral. When freed to write as he wanted to, Carver opted for the optimistic over the bleak.
Carver is hardly limited by his style--to me, his sparse language fits the oftentimes sparse lives of his characters. Carver employs what Hemingway called the "iceberg technique," submerging 9/10 of meaning beneath the surface of his language. This does not imply that meaning is not there, but simply that it is submerged. This may take more work for us as readers, but I ultimately prefer Carver's taut writing to the flowery language to which too many writers are subject. To me, Carver is a model for what it means to be careful and selective in one's writing; it seems fitting that he is perhaps the most imitated writer in creative writing courses across the country
--Dan Hatfield
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[Caldwell and Scott] both seem to agree that Carver's confinement in his fiction to a single social class, and to a limited range of subjects within that social class, constitutes a serious flaw in his writing. Certainly he is not, as Christopher complains, either Balzac or Jane Austen. But neither of them is prized as a writer of short stories. Aren't short stories by nature limited in scope? Do we find greater scope in the short stories of Chekhov, Gogol, Joyce, or John Updike? Don't we value them precisely for their skill in penetrating and revealing a narrow world?
--Howard Helsinger
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Scholarly recognition is what keeps pretty much all non-current literature alive. It's not just Ring Lardner or Hemingway. Nobody would read Goethe or Balzac if they had not been included in somebody's canon. As a librarian, I can tell you that your average reader reads current popular, genre fiction. The classics, the semi-classics and the would-be classics of yesteryear are read on assignment.
--Lieselotte Buecher
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