Short Sagas for Team MAGA
There is much to gain from reading the short stories of Raymond Carver, especially for today’s conservatives. When he published in the ’70s and ’80s, Carver was unsurpassed in his popularity. Today his settings, for instance, would be immediately recognizable to the average Trump supporter: fishing trips, small farms, barber shops, motel rooms, bingo halls, and bars (plenty of bars).
His scenes are small or midsized towns in the Columbia Plateau, the Great Basin, or the Pacific Northwest (mostly coastless parts like Clatskanie, Oregon, or Yakima, Washington, where Carver was born and grew up, respectively). These regions were industrial, sleepy, homogenous, and poor during Carver’s time (he died an alcoholic’s death in 1988 at the age of 50).
Pretty much all his characters are white and working-class, a group largely sandwiched between privileged, coastal elites and handout recipients. These are people who cannot live in a world of make-believe and have to confront head-on the realities of belt-tightening, scouring for money for rent or hospital bills, cars on the verge of breakdown, etc.
Still, Carver’s plots do vary: an elderly man losing his farm to a slug infestation; a father who abandons the family dog because they can’t afford it; a postal worker who can’t stand a hippie couple who have moved onto his route; an apparently evicted man who moves the interior of his home outside for a “house party”; a depressed divorcee who finds inspiration from a double amputee, a door-to-door salesman, etc.
Besides praying to God, Carver’s struggling characters cope through alcohol—tons of it. His stories are drenched in booze: beer, whiskey, and vodka, mostly (sometimes in the morning coffee). Marital strife, barely making ends meet, un- and under-employment, struggling with support payments, and isolation and loneliness are all lessened (when not worsened) by bottles of liquor and glasses of beer—in addition to enough cigarettes to fill “serving tray-size” ashtrays with.
Influenced by Hemingway (his favorite), Carver employed a hyper-minimal writing style. His bone-dry, unpretentious prose represents an effort to portray working people as authentically as possible, and with the requisite seriousness. Anything more descriptive and floral might even seem incongruous with the underlying subject matter.
His dialogue is clipped and elliptical, which creates an atmosphere of detachment. Characters are captured through their actions as much as through their words; at times, what is not said communicates more than what is.
The emotions that come with relational conflict are intentionally not articulated well, if at all—but this, of course, is the reality for average people. One also gets the impression that Carver’s characters are exhausted from their cowering day-to-day existence, or even scared of hurting the one thing that makes their otherwise crushing lives livable: not money or career mobility (which they do not have), but their relationships.
The fraught tension between two ex-lovers in “A Serious Talk,” for instance, is never expressed even though it is so immediately palpable to the reader. The two are okay with each other, but it’s clear they have had a difficult past. The tension is only released when the former husband resorts to a minor act of property damage to express himself.
Wealthy or nonwhite characters do not really come up in Carver’s work. In one story, a well-to-do couple at an upscale restaurant tensely endure each other in what is certainly a doomed marriage. In another, a black veteran fresh from Vietnam shows a white man and his mistress a “gook ear” he brought back in a box before trying to intimidate the woman into making out with him for $10—the woman is so broke that she admits later, “I really could have used that money.”
Though Carver features numerous bad-behaving working people who clearly invite the reader’s derision (for example, men imposing themselves on women, women who leave their families for lovers, violent drunks, etc.), his realism exudes sympathy for the people he portrays. Refreshingly for conservatives, perhaps, Carver’s characters are manifestations of the human condition in its purest form. People act poorly not because they are oppressed, although it is certainly clear the American Dream has long passed them by, but because they have bad personal character. There are also no overwrought social manifestos, and each short story contains honest, no-nonsense portrayals of masculinity and gender roles. These are simply real stories about real people going through real problems.
In a recent must-read piece about the state of American literature, Jacob Savage wrote that whereas contemporary fiction seems replete with page upon page of agonizing over gender and racial identity, the identity of whites generally is not a topic that fashionable writers tend to engage with except hyper-critically (to say that whites lack a meaningful perspective, have nothing to say, should not be listened to, etc.). The fact that Carver wrote about white working people at all might be enough to make today’s literati uncomfortable, which is likely why he is not apparently discussed anymore, despite formerly appearing in outlets like the New Yorker. For this reason alone, it would have been nice to have him around today. But at least we still have what he did write.
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