Cosmoetica 2008-10-16
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Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of really bad writing. Worse, he can accomplish all in between. This is not so bad, except for the fact that I should have started my first sentence this way: Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of publishing really bad writing. The fact that he let manifestly weak prose slip by into publication is a sad fact, because every writer has written something bad- a writer is judged by that he lets into the public domain- his/her totality of work is saved for the scholars decades or centuries hence. Having recently read his collection of short stories titled Cathedral I was hoping for far more from this book- an anthology, which generally denotes that the writer is putting forth the best of the best.
Such is not the case with Short Cuts since it seems to have been an ad hoc commercial pursuit designed to coincide with the Robert Altman film of the same name, culled from RC tales. Actually nine short stories and a poem.... In a way, he is, at his worst, far closer to the unwittingly self-parodic short story grotesques of a William Faulkner, or the even worse Flannery O'Connor. Bad dialogue can distance, subliminally, a reader from the story, and often leave the reader puzzled at the later actions of a character, because dialogue is always shown selectively, granted to a reader by a narrator that may or may not be reliable. RC is far better at standard narration and interior monologues. In a sense RC is an idea writer, not a plot writer, yet he may have been advised by others to let plot dictate, to get published. While, in the short run that may have got him published, in the long run it hurt his overall oeuvre.
That said, he is still a better short fictionist than either WF or FOC. Yet, still, it gnaws at me- what could have been had this man had just a smidgin' more self-confidence, and a tad less booze? As things turned out RC ended up much like his work- tantalizingly good, with hints of greatness, but too much muddle, and not in the middle!