Everything Must Go

I have watched quite a few movies lately as I have been consistently under the weather and have not reviewed any of them. We will attempt to begin the process of correcting that with a review of the under appreciated Will Ferrell movie from 2011 Everything Must Go.

Based on a Raymond Carver short story Why Don't You Dance. When one says based on, in this case they mean that there is an ever so slight similarity, mainly that both lead characters have a yard sale of their belongings. The story which I had recently read is much shallower in depth and understanding than the movie.

Will Ferrell plays Nick Halsey a salesman who is also an alcoholic. As the movie begins we see Nick being fired from his job for an incident that occurred on a business trip in Denver. After vandalizing his Supervisor's car on the way out of the parking lot and then stopping to buy beer on the way home Nick arrives home to find out that the locks have been changed and his belongings are all over the yard.

Nick settles in to his easy chair in the yard. The next morning when he goes to get more beer he returns to find his company car being repossessed. Life is getting worse. Soon the police show up and Nick when confronted with trouble has them call his sponsor in AA, a Frank Garcia, who is a detective. The detective comes by and gets Nick a three day ticket for a yard sale which will buy him sometime to figure things out.

Over the course of the next few days Nick develops a relationship with a young boy in the neighborhood who is apparently unsupervised for much of the day and a new neighbor across the street who has just moved in and is waiting for her husband to arrive. Along the way we learn more about Nick's relationship with his wife and his sponsor and how even that is not as simple as he might like it to be.

The movie did not do well, being a change of pace for Ferrell perhaps people did not get what they expected. That said Ferrell was cast perfectly in the role. Exceptionally believable as the typical frat boy turned professional but still drinking his life away, this man suddenly hit in the face with reality and the world of grown ups and not knowing how to handle it except to do what he has already done, crawl deeper into his immature ways and drink it away. Ferrell provides depth here one does not expect. One wonders if he ever will get a chance for a serious role or if he is so typecast that can never happen for him. If so it is a loss for as funny as he can be one gets the sense that there is much more talent in Ferrell than we expect in our physical comedians.

This is an interesting, sweet in its own way, dark in another way movie. It is not in anyway like any of the broad comedy one expects from Ferrell. Be warned and enjoy it for what it is.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Continuing my journey through the short stories of Raymond Carver this collection would win my vote for the best of them.

Carver's characters continue to introduce us to flawed characters, characters who steal and cheat, drink to excess, and who find themselves disillusioned and challenged beyond their means.

The beginning story Feathers features two couples having a dinner party. Strange story points such as a mold of crooked teeth, the world's ugliest baby, and a peacock with the run of the house. Carver write with vigor and vulgarity too, certainly one of the more modern writers in that regard but this story was strong.

In Chefs House a separated couple has a rebirth in their relationship when the man is fortunate enough to rent a small ocean side cabin. He quits drinking, and their days together are simple and happy. Their hope for the future is bright but it all fades when the Chef advises that his daughter will need to rent the house. With this news reality sets in and the husband reaches for a drink.

A Small Good Thing is another take on the story The Bath in a previous effort. Unlike the first version this story expands and has the parents of the injured boy confronting the baker of the birthday cake. This ending is far superior to the other and is quite moving.

Careful becomes the only story I have ever seen centered on Earwax while Where I'm Calling From is another strong story centered on two men who form a friendship while they are in an alcohol rehabilitation facility.

Fever is the story of how a man, abandoned by his wife with his two kids comes to grips with taking care of his life. The Bridle tells the story of a farming couple from Minnesota who after losing their farm end up landing at a hotel in Arizona. How their presence ripples those staying at the hotel makes for an interesting story.

The last story is the title story. In Cathedral a man suffers a visit that his wife has engineered with a former employer of hers, a blind man. Uncomfortable at the prospect of a blind man in his house , his attitude changes when, like it seems all Carver characters they over-imbibe in alcohol.

Seriously Carver's characters need to go on a serious wagon.

The stories in this collection were all of a better level than some of his others though the number of standout stories were smaller. Consistently good rather than excellent and mediocre. One has to decide from themselves which they prefer.

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.

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.