The distinctive voice that slashes its way through What We Talk About is at the heart of the question. That voice was associated with Carver, but Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor at Knopf, reportedly claimed to have edited the stories so heavily that they were as much his as they were Carver’s. Had Carver really gotten better, healthier, happier when he wrote Cathedral? Or had he simply gotten a different editor? In 1998, Max, then a writer for The New York Times Magazine, visited Indiana University, which had acquired Lish’s papers in 1991. Max found that the stories indeed bore the signs of
...more
