Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver

As I continue my journey through 20th century American fiction I have landed on the works of Raymond Carver. Carver noted primarily as a writer of short stories published several books of stories.

Will You Please Be Quiet Please is one of the most successful and well thought of of his collections. When I first started reading stories I was a little surprised by them. The writing is surely grainier, grittier, than much of what I have read from other noted authors of the period.

Illusions to sex are often and obvious and indeed a big part of the storyline in several of Carver's stories. His characters are not stock brokers and insurance salesman figuring out an existential crisis, they are more blue collar with rougher word and desires. In a sense he is the doing the same thing as John Cheever just in a much more overt, grimier way. The effect for me was jarring.

As I continued reading the stories a few did stand out. The first story that I thought was strong was Nobody Said Anything. Told by a young boy who skips school, decides to go fishing, gets a ride from a pretty girl in a sporty car, and eventually as he is fishing joins up with another boy to catch a large fish. The debate then turns to who gets the trophy fish. When he returns he returns to much the same scene he has seen that morning. His Mom and Dad fighting. We do not really know what they were fighting about but it is clear it is a big part of the everyday life of these characters. The story itself is mostly a day in the life of a boy and it works.

Sixty Acres is a story about a cash poor family that has good hunting land attached to the homestead. The owner hears that people are hunting his property. He goes down in the evening and catches two young men doing just that, he scares them and sends them on their way. As he gets home he ponders with his wife the possibilities of leasing some of the hunting land for the princely sum of one thousand dollars a year. As the story ends he is balancing potential profit against the assumed wishes of the family forebears who left the property to him.

Ducks is a great story that centers on a mill worker who has dinner with his wife and leaves to go the night shift. He returns in just a couple of hours as the mill has closed for the night due to a foreman falling dead of a heart attack. The man is naturally upset by this, the seeming randomeness of life and death. He and his wife share the evening, but in the end he lies in bed and cannot sleep, he looks out the window and struggles with his thoughts. Something and someplace we have all been.

How about this is another strong story. A couple leaves the city to go live in a remote camp in the Northwest. They have romantic visions of living off the grid, fending for themselves and getting away from the dirtiness of the city. When they arrive however the house is in bad shape, it is very remote, electricity and running water non exixtent, and the foolishness of their vision becomes apparent. The woman is concerned but tells the man they will just have to love each other and make due. The man is frustrated with himself and his disappointment cannot be papered over no matter how hard he tries. An excellent look at how we often lift what we do not know to expectations that reality cannot match.

The title and last story in the collection is another take on how when we find out what we claim to want to know we often regret it. A young couple, both educators have an apparently idylic life. They have two children, they teach, have a strong group of friends and life should be good. One evening conversation turns to a dinner party a few years earlier where in the haze of too much drinking the husband has wondered what transpired between his wife and another man at the party. Poked and prodded to tell him what happened, that " he will not be upset" the wife tells the truth of her mistake. As should be expected the husband wanted the truth but was not prepared for it. He leaves angrily, goes on a bender, goes to a part of town he is not familiar with and sits in for a few hands of high stakes poker. He gets mugged and the night has gone from bad to worse. Eventually he finds his way home, his wife is tearful, he however will not look at her much less speak to her. He goes to bed and eventually she comes in and wins him over, perhaps by the same methods she betrayed him. We rarely want the truth, we just want the truth to be what we want.