Appendix B

Reviews for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

From Kirkus Reviews - April 20, 1981
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

The very best stories here—“The Bath” (a dying child, the eerie spaces he clears) and “After the Denim” (an elderly couple and a hippie couple at bingo night, with the utter impossibility of ever lining lives up parallel)—both suggest, nearly unforgettably, that the most dangerous thing that any of us own is the past. “What people won’t do!” comments an innocent, if vacuous, lover in the title story—and you sense Carver in the background, knowing all too well what people will do. Yet for all the true lugubrious anarchy we’re so economically reminded of here, Carver’s fiction may be less original than it seems. Dependent on a Jack Benny-ish deadpan, on the ironic situation that bends itself in two and then can’t be re-straightened, Carver is essentially writing John O’Hara stories—but with all the water wrung out. The dialogue is faultlessly non-sequitur; the characters are often simultaneously released and terse (thanks to liquor); violence is daily and unremarkable. These are stories, in other words, strictly about mores, not morals—and if looked at in the long literary view, they can seem thin, sneakily sentimental, all tone. Still, as artifacts of American culture right this minute, they are mightily impressive and, at their best, invested with a fiercely humane pathos.

From The New York Times - April 26, 1981
“Stories are Full of Edges and Silences” by Michael Wood

His writing is full of edges and silences, haunted by things not said, not even to be guessed at. He has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except the very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world of all of us.

…

These stories are full of canceled or incomplete adventures, parties that are not over. A recurring joke hints that possibilities are often enough, that actual practice might be going too far. “‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it will bother me, Arnold. Please do.’ He decided against it.” “‘He writes something almost every day,’ Paula said. ‘Is that a fact?’ Morgan said. ‘That’s impressive. What did you write today, may I ask?’ ‘Nothing,’ Myers said.”

…

In other stories it is the failure of speech, rather than its absence, that does the talking: “He wanted to say something else. But there was no saying what it should be.” “There were things he wanted to say, grieving things, consoling things, things like that.” In the last story in the book a husband leaving home insists that he wants to “say one more thing … But then he could not think what it could possibly be.”

The point is not that words are inadequate, or that actions speak louder. It is that the desire to talk can be perceived as a need, and that need has its fluency, makes use of any language that comes to hand. This is a troublesome fact for a writer, but Mr. Carver does not dodge it. “She seemed anxious, or maybe that’s too strong a word.” Only a very delicate stylist would worry about the strength of “anxious” and the milder, perhaps unnamable quality of feeling that hides behind this attempt at description. In Mr. Carver’s silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said.

From The New York Times - April 15, 1981
“Books of the Times” by Anatole Broyard

Mr. Carver’s second story contains a strong scene. An itinerant street photographer comes to the same house and asks the same man whether he would like some photographs of the house. The man said yes, and has himself photographed on every side of the house, in full face and profile. He even climbs up on the roof to be photographed there, like a survivor on a raft, or as if he had climbed up to the top of his history in order to jump off. It’s a beautiful image of a desperate and abandoned man.

Unfortunately, Mr. Carver has elected to make the photographer a handless one. He has chrome hooks instead of hands. The first-person narrator of the story invites the photographer in for a cup of coffee, telling us, with remarkably bad taste, “I wanted to see how he would hold a cup.” The handless photographer tells the man in the house that he once had kids too, that it was they who were responsible for the loss of his hands.

Whatever sort of symbolism Mr. Carver has in mind here, it cannot fail to be atrocious. Some sort of parallel, some chrome-plated metaphor is being polished, and from this point on, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” reads like a book by a different author.

There is a story about a man whose 65-year-old mother “puts out.” It is written in faux-naif Hemingway sentences as they might be spoken by an illiterate person. There is in every line a loud and self-conscious artlessness, a double disingenuousness reflecting on itself.

The next story, which is about adults, employs an “I go - she goes” idiom that we reluctantly associate with children. Mr. Carver uses repetition in dialogue in a manner that takes us all the way back to the homely sentimentalism of the 30’s, in which the proletariat struggles with language and thought like a beetle on its back, flailing its legs. The story ends with the wife saying “Duane,” her husband’s name, and the husband-narrator observing “in this too, she was right.”

Tugging at Baby

Reading this, one feels an almost furious desire, so transparent is the device, to shout “In what too, is she right?” The sentence means nothing and is intended to mean anything -and everything. It’s the most flagrant and common imposition in current fiction, to end a story with a sententious ambiguity that leaves the reader holding the bag.