What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

Short stories are my thing. As much as I love all types of books, literature and biography I am a big fan of the short story. In the second half of the twentieth century Raymond Carver was one of the Masters of the form. As John Cheever wrote often about the characters of Long Island, New York City and suburban Connecticut Carver too writes often about the same characters. Carver's however are darker, often plied with alcohol and often with violence just below the surface.

Not all of Carver's stories work for me. However when his stories work, they work extremely well. Gazebo is the first of the winning stories in the collection. A couple with dreams of improving their lives remembers a gazebo they have seen in the past and pictures that as the epitome of married bliss, while they deal with the troubles in their young marriage.

I Could See the Smallest Things in just four pages expresses the under the radar pain of a friendship between two working men, neighbors, who have fallen out of friendship. Only Carver could have a man out digging night crawlers at three in the morning speak to his neighbors wife out to close a forgotten gate and convey so much with a message to her husband that he says hi.

In this stage perhaps Carver had a thing for the subtext of water. In perhaps the most famous story from the collection, " The Bath", features a family celebrating a young boys birthday. When the boy is injured and in the hospital with a life threatening injury the world outside keeps turning and in " So Much Water Close to Home" a group of men who discover the body of a drowned girl they are not prepared for the anger directed at them when they finish their fishing trip before reporting it. Clearly cell phones would have been a huge asset to these gentlemen.

The title story is a bit longer and features two couples discussing love. All four middle aged, at one point they were all married to others, have differing opinions as to the meaning of love. Just under the surface the differences between the characters opinions are a bit more in conflict and as the gin flows the conversation does too. In the end nothing really happens, the more they try to express what love really is, the more they cannot speak to it. As the story ends the couples, drunk before it gets dark are hungry and would like to go get some food. Still, thinking in their interior about what is love, no one moves and the story ends.

An uneven collection, still with some very valuable stories.