Raymond Carver

In my continued effort to read more short stories, I've recently finished What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver's exceptional collection of vignettes focused on the darker corners of American life. 

Let me say up front just how much I enjoyed Carver's prose. I'd read Cathedral several years ago, but Talk About Love is better: it's that much more crisp, that much more refined. Sure, there's that element of the unspoken, but Carver doesn't lean too heavily on this. Instead, he writes about what he sees -- and what he sees is painful, indeed. 

For me, several of the stories here read as the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting: there's sorrow, isolation, and grief. And more: there's loneliness, a real sense that, despite our best efforts, we're bound to miss the mark, to say and do what we'll come to regret. 

My favorite stories in Talk About Love are those like 'So Much Water' and 'The Third Thing' -- stories that paint a picture, that balance context with implication to  render something true. So many of these stories were a revelation: an unyielding view into common experience. 

Carver has achieved something special here, I think, and his contribution to American letters cannot be in doubt. This is masterful stuff.