What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
(Raymond Carver)
Raymond Carver is the type of short story writer that makes fiction writing seem easy. There is such an incredible flow to his prose that one could almost imagine him sitting down and creating each masterpiece in a matter of minutes. That is the most deceptive appearance of some great fiction. No doubt these stories took agony to create, late nights with rapidly emptying bottles of whiskey (which quite often sneaks into the stories).
The end result is shocking in its intensity and vibrancy. Carver creates characters and scenes that seem more realistic than daily life. You almost feel like your life is fantasy and you are a ghost looking in on the real world. His words are made out of concrete. Sometimes this can feel a little claustrophobic, you are brought in rather close to these characters, who are, after all, strangers. They have some pretty tough lives too, so it's hard to have to be the quiet one in the room watching them go through their struggles, almost voyeuristic.
Carver is also the type of writer that causes fiction workshops across the country to be filled to the brim. This is somewhat due to the fact that he makes it look easy, someone might think, "wow, he just described that mundane moment in someone's life and made it seem imbued with meaning and deeper purpose, I can do that too!" But, I can?t recall how many thousands of times he was brought up in my fiction workshops in college, mostly for the crystallization of his descriptive powers. He is a construction worker, busily setting up scenes and worlds in your head while you innocently flip the pages. And some of them are heartbreaking. He captures the incommunicable nature of human interaction and highlights the ridiculousness of the ordinary. Or the concept of ordinary, because what is normal anyways?
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