The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 January 2008
by Raymond Carver
There are seventeen stories in this small collection, few of them any longer than ten slim pages. Carver's writing is extremely spare, and it is easy to liken him to Hemingway, among others. His stories were widely praised when he was alive and publishing. Today, though, they can seem perhaps a little too sparse. The endings are often ambiguous, an effect which can leave a haunting feeling in the reader, but which can as often seem unsatisfying and truncated. The stories here have recurrent themes of cracked and broken relationships and family lives, often steeped in alcohol, resentment and loneliness. There is an almost wondrous or ethereal quality to the kind of lonely characters Carver depicts here. They're usually men, but not always, and they have an airy distance from the world, a distance engendered by bitterness or selfishness. They are emotionally violent and they never quite understand where they are in the world. The writing can be very compelling, but, again, sparse and occasionally unsatisfying. (One of the stories, So Much Water so Close to Home was recently made into a feature length movie, Jindabyne. Other Carver stories have been made into several short films and a movie called Short Cuts.)
There was, recently, a fascinating opportunity to compare Carver's published work with earlier more florid versions. The title story of this collection was republished in The New Yorker magazine's last issue of 2007, along with some notes and letters between Carver and his editor. Beginners turns out to look quite different than What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In the opinion of this reader, the earlier thicker version is deeper, and has an almost completely different and more compassionate effect than the later, drastically cut, version. But, Carver ultimately approved the deep cuts in his work, so which version is the canonical one?