I pictured Carver in terms of hijinks and love triangles, petty theft and seductions, ash falling unnoticed from the tip of his cigarette as he sat engrossed at his typewriter, riding the comet’s tail of a bender into its ruthless wisdom. Whatever psychic ledges his long drunks had taken him to, whatever voids he had glimpsed from those perches, I pictured him deftly smuggling that desperation into the quiet betrayals and pregnant pauses of his fiction. One of Carver’s friends put it like this: “Ray was our designated Dylan Thomas, I think—our contact with the courage to face all possible
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