Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study

by Kirk Nesset, Raymond Carver (Contributor)

Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the “godfather of minimalism,” has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 Kenyon Review story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver’s stories.) Drawing on representative tales from each of Carver’s major volumes of fiction, Nesset’s critical exploration leads us deep into the heart of Carver country, an eerie post-industrial world of low-rent survivors. In the earliest fiction, the politics of sex are tied to politics of fortune and chance; marriage as an institution is capricious and unsettling. In later stories, the gesture of telling stories provides an escape for certain of these characters, metaphorically and otherwise; and in Carver’s last stories, subtle strategies of language offer a similar, if more tentative release. From beginning to end, Carver’s distinctive, highly imitative style is intrinsic to his subject and is crucial in presenting what Carver called the “dark side of Reagan’s America.”

In this comprehensive study of Carver, Nesset discusses the relationship of minimalism and postmodern trends and the rise of new realism. By locating Carver in the gallery of American letters, Nesset shows him to be at once more simple and more complex than we might have believed, skillfully laying the groundwork for Carver studies to come.

Genres: Literary Criticism

131 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Paradise Road and Mr. Agreeable, as well as a book of poems, Saint X, a book of translations, Alphabet of the World, and a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver. His new work in translation is forthcoming: Disappearances, Selected Stories by Edmundo Paz Soldan. Nesset's stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Iowa Review, Agni, Crazyhorse, The Sun, Fiction, Witness and Prairie Schooner, among others. His short short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton's New Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.

He grew up in northern California and studied at UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara, as well as abroad. He has taught at Whittier College, Allegheny College and the University of California, and served many summers as writer in residence at Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany).

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good analysis, touching on just about every one of Carver’s stories, because it examines how Carver used language, diction and syntax and word choice, to achieve a lot of his effects. A good amount of attention is also paid to where language isn’t used, where, for the character, speaking has failed as a mode of communication, which is one of Carver’s predominant themes. Nesset also traces other themes that recur in the stories, such as, but not limited to, marriage, love, and failures of intimacy. He also refers to Carver’s poetry, essays, and interviews for supporting material. The study has a good bibliography, endnotes, and index, unfortunately it doesn’t follow MLA style and that makes it really hard to go from the analysis to the supporting sources and even harder to find the exact place in the stories themselves that the analysis is referring to. Stylistically, Nesset jumps around a lot in his paragraphs, going form story to story to story, and while it builds evidence for his point, it does tend to obscure some of the specifics, and again it makes it difficult if you want to compare analysis with the stories. For instance, to follow the arguments in some paragraphs would require you to look at 6 stories contained in four different collections.

[D. Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is of special interest since it is written by a scholar and an accomplished writer in his own right.