If a college student is interested in learning how to write fiction, they will often take a class called "Intro to Fiction" or "Intro to Creative Writing".
I think it's best to read them in order. "What We Talk About" can be kind of hard to read, so I wouldn't start with that one. They're all great. Lish is great, Carver is great. The abrupt, Lish-influenced ending of "The Bath" is brilliant. But "A Small Good Thing" is nice too. When you're done you can watch Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" which recycles the plots, but not the emotional texture.
Carver's stories are very Chekhovian. They are often about people who are stuck in a rut. The climax typically involves the reader (and sometimes the character) gaining knowledge about their situation. So it really wasn't new even when he was writing.
I think the need for formal innovation is exaggerated. Carver's stories still work just fine, as do Chekhov's. I do think stories that withhold can be a trap for writers, because there's a temptation to withhold things you don't understand, and that typically leads to boring, vague stories.
I don't know. A Small Good Thing, in particular seems overwritten. I was surprised when I went back to read "The Bath", by how short it was. It felt so dense, like there was so much there. "A Small Good Thing", in contrast, felt too long for its content. Some of the other expanded versions are okay, but in general I preferred the style in _Cathedral_, which feels like kind of a midway point between _Beginners_ and _What We Talk About_
It's crazy that this story of Carver and Lish isn't central to how everyone is educated about his influence on American literature. I'd never heard about it, and I teach the anthology short stories, I took multiple American literature classes in college that featured a lot of work from the 20th century, etc. It seems like in your description of Carver's original work, he's much more open to getting into the weeds of what's going on in the world around him, but Lish (maybe because of his class background) understands that he'll have more influence on writers at elite institutions if he's mysterious. I wonder if that's because it doesn't exactly fit into a neat box around identity, politics, or literary movements. By 1981, Carver's work is probably looked as pretty conservative in every sense---it's not engaging with race or gender or sexuality in an explicit way, it doesn't engage with postmodernism, it comes out of the most elite and typical place it could emerge from (IWW). It's the opposite of literary writers like Donald Barthelme or Lorrie Moore or Jamaica Kincaid or Lydia Davis, and obviously there's a million "genre" short story writers in science fiction or fantasy that Carver's explicitly not interacting with either. But in this conflict or collaboration with Lish, there's a sense that the two of them are trying to carve out a space for "craft" in some sort of way, and they're wildly successful in most senses, especially given Carver's continued influence.
I think we don't like to talk about the Lish edits because it's such a strange story. All writers get edited, but editors usually don't interfere so heavily in a writer's work, and generally speaking most writers shouldn't allow an editor to interfere this way. We tend to have something of an auteur theory about the best writing: the work is great because it's the product of a singular genius. With Carver-Lish, that clearly wasn't true, so it kind of disrupts the traditional narrative.
Carver engages with gender and sexuality a lot. And race occasionally. It's true that his stories are in the tradition of realism. He liked Richard Yates, who generally derided postmodernism.
People today think everything needs to have an "angle," a neat, easily summarized perspective on a certain topical issue. But I think fiction that tends to last lacks an angle. Carver engages very bluntly with what certain people today would call "toxic masculinity" or "rape culture," but he lacks an angle. There isn't a little voice saying, "We all know this behavior is, like, problematic." That voice is the bane of contemporary literature.
I don't disagree that angle often fails, especially if it's trying to flatter some hypothetical audience. But it's interesting that in Naomi's reading Carver probably did have an "angle" (life will turn out ok, if you don't try too hard to make it that way) and Lish blunted the angle by shaving off his endings and it made Carver's work more celebrated. It helps to explain why the complaint about a lot of MFA programs is "they were always trying to blunt my angle." Yes, because it worked once, with Carver, and the people who successfully have an angle now often hide it under complicated story structures or irony and it emerges almost after the fact to stab you somewhere. But most Lish-esque editing isn't making the stories better, because the whole story was set up to have an angle and if you blunt it, the rest of the story doesn't make sense.
I think you're trying to find an angle to the Lish-Carver relationship. A lot of people do that: "Lish ruined the stories" or "Lish made the stories great." To me, all three collections are great.
I don’t think carver’s work would have been conservative, either stylistically or thematically, in 1981. The bulk of mainstream American literature at the time was closer to Carver than to postmodernism or Jamaica Kincaid or Lydia Davis. I also think lorrie moore owes Carver a debt.
Been learning and writing minimalism for 4 years now. Bought this same Carver collection, and Im not crazy about it. Each story definitely elicits a specific emotion, but it doesnt connect with me. However, if you like it, great!
Love the angry people accusing Carver fans of being angry. God forbid anyone have different tastes than you. Hello pot, meet kettle.
Can't wrap my head around why some people think everyone should write like its 1880. Use ten dollar words no one has uttered in over a century. Overly complex sentences. Tons of detail that doesnt push the story forward.
Writing like that has zero chance of connecting with the vast majority of people today. The language we speak is the language, not the language that was written down or the rules that were made up centuries ago.
PS: Being easy to read is extremely difficult to acheive.
I have enjoyed Carver in the past, but my mind was blown when, in grad school, a friend asked me to write a one act play from the writings of Robert Coover. Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. Check him out!
Thanks for this. Thanks for reminding me I like Carver's stories; they informed my writing back in the day. Perhaps they still do. I appreciate how you invest your time and spirit into a thing before taking a stand one way or the other, and that you don't bash others when you speak your mind. It's why I keep reading these posts.
This was great, thank you. I actually just finished Cathedral yesterday so this was great timing. I picked it up on a whim from the friends of the library book shop, because I love short stories and had yet to read any Carver. Unfamiliar, I didn't know it was his third collection and the Carver/Lish dynamic feels like something I had heard it once before and forgotten.
I enjoyed the collection, and intend to read more of his. This gives me terrific context!
"K-Mart realism" was never about products; Saunders was out to lunch on that. It was about something other than the romantic or middle-class psychological realisms that were prominent previously. *People* who shop at K-Mart, where the average New Yorker reader would nevah!, not stuff from K-Mart.
Read the short fiction of a John Fante or a Harry Mark Petrakis, to name two previously prominent writers of short fiction that were more or less wiped out by the arrival of Carver. Of course, a big part of what made Carver stand out was that Lish removed the sentimentalism and the pretty simplistic "I am not happy because you drink too much" psychologizing from it. These were typical of the post-war pre-Carver story.
I find "Cathedral" to be Carver's worst major story, and also the one readers of science fiction like the most, which makes sense given your prior comments about Ted Chiang--a tech novum with emotional business stapled to it. Architecture is a techne and cathedrals are big and important, half-starship, half-castle.
Back in 2007 The New Yorker had used a bit of HTML trickery to publish "What We Talk About/Beginners" on the same page--you could click and see the redline edits. Sadly, that page died some years ago.
Yes, but...Carver is clearly writing exactly those kinds of romantic or middle-class psychological realisms that you're talking about. All of his stories are about guys who are sad bc their wives left them.
John Fante I've read, though just Ask The Dust. Will have to check out his short stories
Romanticism champions the individual, glorifies elements of culture even as it describes their discontents (both Fante and Petrakis are doing immigration narratives that complicate assimilation), goes for lush turns of phrase now and again--romantic realism isn't think sort of kitchen-sink or K-Mart realism, and surely Carver isn't doing middle-class bourgeois realism, which is rather the point of your post. His protagonists aren't neurotic middle-class subjects, they're precarious, often alcoholic, working-class ones.
They are extremely neurotic and not overtly working class. Their obsession is with their own personal lives, generally with their wives having left them, which causes them to act out in baffling ways.
Oh yeah that's a good one! It was originally published in Esquire, where Lish was the editor, so I'm pretty sure it's one where he had a hand in cutting it down
Naomi, you knocked it out of the park with this one. I hope some English professors assign this post as pre-reading before diving into Carver’s writing.
Exactly as you described, I read a couple of his short stories in undergrad. I never read enough of his work to become a Carver hype man. My own fault. Baldwin, Wolff, McCullers and others made more of an impact on me. This post immediately made me want to go back and read these stories, both versions, and appreciate now what I didn’t back then. Outstanding writing and commentary. Very much appreciate you taking the time to share this here on Substack.
So sorry I didn’t hit reply on this. I recently read Old School, which I enjoyed. I’ve long thought Wolff writes boys well. I’m working on a novel about boys in a group home so wanted to get more immersed in those feelings on the page.
I tend to find his stories about civilians more relatable than those with a war setting. The Rich Brother, Hunters in the Snow. Firelight, I like as well.
Thanks again for all you bring to the Substack community. Your recent post about Irina and book reviews was great.
I'm a big Carver fan and I think one reason he's so popular in workshops is that he's also pedagogically very useful: he shows how you can do a lot with a little. I think that's a more applicable lesson for a lot of people who are learning creative writing than what a student might actually be able to take away and utilize for themselves from a more maximalist or experimental short story writer like Donald Barthelme or Kathy Acker, etc
Of course, I've read Carver and even before my MFA--and I distinctly recall the revelations about Lish's intrusive editing and Tess's decision to republish.
Another male writer, with a sure masculine slant and who was both my teacher and friend is Lee K. Abbott, who wrote only short fiction and was a master teacher. I hope you will find him. When he died, I was asked by Lee Martin, another author worth a read, to come to Lee's memorial and read a tribute that I suppose at some point, I'll post--most likely on Inner Life, my other Substack.
Oh boy, this was basically the prerequisite reading for my senior thesis on the Role of Gordon Lish on Literary Minimalism. Even establishing a baseline definition was such a pain in the butt, because scholars and critics would point to modernists like Hemingway or something, and they simply didn't fit.
If you're curious about Carver's contemporaries and other people that emerged from the school of Lish, consider looking at Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, Mary Robison (?), as well as Carver's own pedagogical spawn, Denis Johnson.
I have a collection by Ann Beattie (The New Yorker stories) that looks interesting. I also want to check out Denis Johnson--another writer I feel like I've read but which I haven't actually. The other names are ones I've heard of but haven't read much of.
Hemingway wrote short sentences for the time - and even then that's debatable - but he wasn't very good at limiting and morphing his elements, or even limiting the scope of his characters' knowledge and texturing the language they used to reflect their expertise.
I think people called him minimalist because of how he used subtext. Looking at Hills like White Elephants, the top story is just a couple speaking in a train station. The understory is two people who probably don't even love each other, trying to figure out whether or not to get an abortion before they part ways forever.
I think it's best to read them in order. "What We Talk About" can be kind of hard to read, so I wouldn't start with that one. They're all great. Lish is great, Carver is great. The abrupt, Lish-influenced ending of "The Bath" is brilliant. But "A Small Good Thing" is nice too. When you're done you can watch Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" which recycles the plots, but not the emotional texture.
Carver's stories are very Chekhovian. They are often about people who are stuck in a rut. The climax typically involves the reader (and sometimes the character) gaining knowledge about their situation. So it really wasn't new even when he was writing.
I think the need for formal innovation is exaggerated. Carver's stories still work just fine, as do Chekhov's. I do think stories that withhold can be a trap for writers, because there's a temptation to withhold things you don't understand, and that typically leads to boring, vague stories.
I don't know. A Small Good Thing, in particular seems overwritten. I was surprised when I went back to read "The Bath", by how short it was. It felt so dense, like there was so much there. "A Small Good Thing", in contrast, felt too long for its content. Some of the other expanded versions are okay, but in general I preferred the style in _Cathedral_, which feels like kind of a midway point between _Beginners_ and _What We Talk About_
I agree that Beginners is subpar, it's not canonical to me
It's crazy that this story of Carver and Lish isn't central to how everyone is educated about his influence on American literature. I'd never heard about it, and I teach the anthology short stories, I took multiple American literature classes in college that featured a lot of work from the 20th century, etc. It seems like in your description of Carver's original work, he's much more open to getting into the weeds of what's going on in the world around him, but Lish (maybe because of his class background) understands that he'll have more influence on writers at elite institutions if he's mysterious. I wonder if that's because it doesn't exactly fit into a neat box around identity, politics, or literary movements. By 1981, Carver's work is probably looked as pretty conservative in every sense---it's not engaging with race or gender or sexuality in an explicit way, it doesn't engage with postmodernism, it comes out of the most elite and typical place it could emerge from (IWW). It's the opposite of literary writers like Donald Barthelme or Lorrie Moore or Jamaica Kincaid or Lydia Davis, and obviously there's a million "genre" short story writers in science fiction or fantasy that Carver's explicitly not interacting with either. But in this conflict or collaboration with Lish, there's a sense that the two of them are trying to carve out a space for "craft" in some sort of way, and they're wildly successful in most senses, especially given Carver's continued influence.
I think we don't like to talk about the Lish edits because it's such a strange story. All writers get edited, but editors usually don't interfere so heavily in a writer's work, and generally speaking most writers shouldn't allow an editor to interfere this way. We tend to have something of an auteur theory about the best writing: the work is great because it's the product of a singular genius. With Carver-Lish, that clearly wasn't true, so it kind of disrupts the traditional narrative.
Carver engages with gender and sexuality a lot. And race occasionally. It's true that his stories are in the tradition of realism. He liked Richard Yates, who generally derided postmodernism.
People today think everything needs to have an "angle," a neat, easily summarized perspective on a certain topical issue. But I think fiction that tends to last lacks an angle. Carver engages very bluntly with what certain people today would call "toxic masculinity" or "rape culture," but he lacks an angle. There isn't a little voice saying, "We all know this behavior is, like, problematic." That voice is the bane of contemporary literature.
I don't disagree that angle often fails, especially if it's trying to flatter some hypothetical audience. But it's interesting that in Naomi's reading Carver probably did have an "angle" (life will turn out ok, if you don't try too hard to make it that way) and Lish blunted the angle by shaving off his endings and it made Carver's work more celebrated. It helps to explain why the complaint about a lot of MFA programs is "they were always trying to blunt my angle." Yes, because it worked once, with Carver, and the people who successfully have an angle now often hide it under complicated story structures or irony and it emerges almost after the fact to stab you somewhere. But most Lish-esque editing isn't making the stories better, because the whole story was set up to have an angle and if you blunt it, the rest of the story doesn't make sense.
I agree that the Lish edits made the stories much more pessimistic, overall.
I think you're trying to find an angle to the Lish-Carver relationship. A lot of people do that: "Lish ruined the stories" or "Lish made the stories great." To me, all three collections are great.
I don’t think whatever happens in MFAs is very similar to what Gordon Lish will do to you.
The story you’re telling is interesting, but I think you’re extrapolating from too few data.
I don’t think carver’s work would have been conservative, either stylistically or thematically, in 1981. The bulk of mainstream American literature at the time was closer to Carver than to postmodernism or Jamaica Kincaid or Lydia Davis. I also think lorrie moore owes Carver a debt.
The best stuff I ever wrote, you couldn't tell an editor was even there. And they were.
Been learning and writing minimalism for 4 years now. Bought this same Carver collection, and Im not crazy about it. Each story definitely elicits a specific emotion, but it doesnt connect with me. However, if you like it, great!
Love the angry people accusing Carver fans of being angry. God forbid anyone have different tastes than you. Hello pot, meet kettle.
Can't wrap my head around why some people think everyone should write like its 1880. Use ten dollar words no one has uttered in over a century. Overly complex sentences. Tons of detail that doesnt push the story forward.
Writing like that has zero chance of connecting with the vast majority of people today. The language we speak is the language, not the language that was written down or the rules that were made up centuries ago.
PS: Being easy to read is extremely difficult to acheive.
Who thinks that people should write like it’s 1880? Genuine.
I have enjoyed Carver in the past, but my mind was blown when, in grad school, a friend asked me to write a one act play from the writings of Robert Coover. Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. Check him out!
So Coover is good? Does he have a collection you recommend?
Hi Naomi,
Yes, I think that his book of stories called "Pricksongs and Descants" is a good example of his writing.
Thanks for this. Thanks for reminding me I like Carver's stories; they informed my writing back in the day. Perhaps they still do. I appreciate how you invest your time and spirit into a thing before taking a stand one way or the other, and that you don't bash others when you speak your mind. It's why I keep reading these posts.
Thank you! I try.
This was great, thank you. I actually just finished Cathedral yesterday so this was great timing. I picked it up on a whim from the friends of the library book shop, because I love short stories and had yet to read any Carver. Unfamiliar, I didn't know it was his third collection and the Carver/Lish dynamic feels like something I had heard it once before and forgotten.
I enjoyed the collection, and intend to read more of his. This gives me terrific context!
Thank you!
"K-Mart realism" was never about products; Saunders was out to lunch on that. It was about something other than the romantic or middle-class psychological realisms that were prominent previously. *People* who shop at K-Mart, where the average New Yorker reader would nevah!, not stuff from K-Mart.
Read the short fiction of a John Fante or a Harry Mark Petrakis, to name two previously prominent writers of short fiction that were more or less wiped out by the arrival of Carver. Of course, a big part of what made Carver stand out was that Lish removed the sentimentalism and the pretty simplistic "I am not happy because you drink too much" psychologizing from it. These were typical of the post-war pre-Carver story.
I find "Cathedral" to be Carver's worst major story, and also the one readers of science fiction like the most, which makes sense given your prior comments about Ted Chiang--a tech novum with emotional business stapled to it. Architecture is a techne and cathedrals are big and important, half-starship, half-castle.
Back in 2007 The New Yorker had used a bit of HTML trickery to publish "What We Talk About/Beginners" on the same page--you could click and see the redline edits. Sadly, that page died some years ago.
Yes, but...Carver is clearly writing exactly those kinds of romantic or middle-class psychological realisms that you're talking about. All of his stories are about guys who are sad bc their wives left them.
John Fante I've read, though just Ask The Dust. Will have to check out his short stories
Romanticism champions the individual, glorifies elements of culture even as it describes their discontents (both Fante and Petrakis are doing immigration narratives that complicate assimilation), goes for lush turns of phrase now and again--romantic realism isn't think sort of kitchen-sink or K-Mart realism, and surely Carver isn't doing middle-class bourgeois realism, which is rather the point of your post. His protagonists aren't neurotic middle-class subjects, they're precarious, often alcoholic, working-class ones.
They are extremely neurotic and not overtly working class. Their obsession is with their own personal lives, generally with their wives having left them, which causes them to act out in baffling ways.
Compare a Carver protag to an Updike or Cheever for quality of neurosis and a Carver paragraph to a Fante or Petrakis one for quality of romanticism.
That's a weird jump to "readers of science fiction" and Ted Chiang. I don't like Ted Chiang but I don't see the slightest connection to "Cathedral."
I am referring to Naomi's prior post about Chiang and also my experiences with SF readers who mention/discuss Carver.
“Neighbors” is a great Carver story. Taut, surprising, interesting
Oh yeah that's a good one! It was originally published in Esquire, where Lish was the editor, so I'm pretty sure it's one where he had a hand in cutting it down
Naomi, you knocked it out of the park with this one. I hope some English professors assign this post as pre-reading before diving into Carver’s writing.
Exactly as you described, I read a couple of his short stories in undergrad. I never read enough of his work to become a Carver hype man. My own fault. Baldwin, Wolff, McCullers and others made more of an impact on me. This post immediately made me want to go back and read these stories, both versions, and appreciate now what I didn’t back then. Outstanding writing and commentary. Very much appreciate you taking the time to share this here on Substack.
Thank you! This is high praise. Which story writers do you like the best? Are Wolff's stories worth reading? I've read a few of his novels / memoirs.
So sorry I didn’t hit reply on this. I recently read Old School, which I enjoyed. I’ve long thought Wolff writes boys well. I’m working on a novel about boys in a group home so wanted to get more immersed in those feelings on the page.
I tend to find his stories about civilians more relatable than those with a war setting. The Rich Brother, Hunters in the Snow. Firelight, I like as well.
Thanks again for all you bring to the Substack community. Your recent post about Irina and book reviews was great.
Of everything of yours I've read over the past few years, this might be my favorite.
Thank you! That is high praise
This is so great. I love learning stuff from you I didn't even know I'd be interested in!
Thank you! I appreciate that.
I really enjoyed your perspective on this!
I'm a big Carver fan and I think one reason he's so popular in workshops is that he's also pedagogically very useful: he shows how you can do a lot with a little. I think that's a more applicable lesson for a lot of people who are learning creative writing than what a student might actually be able to take away and utilize for themselves from a more maximalist or experimental short story writer like Donald Barthelme or Kathy Acker, etc
I agree. What're you gonna learn from Donald Barthelme? Nothing. With Carver you can actually try to do it yourself. In that, he's very fruitful.
Of course, I've read Carver and even before my MFA--and I distinctly recall the revelations about Lish's intrusive editing and Tess's decision to republish.
Another male writer, with a sure masculine slant and who was both my teacher and friend is Lee K. Abbott, who wrote only short fiction and was a master teacher. I hope you will find him. When he died, I was asked by Lee Martin, another author worth a read, to come to Lee's memorial and read a tribute that I suppose at some point, I'll post--most likely on Inner Life, my other Substack.
Amazing essay, Naomi -- but nothing new there!
Had never heard of Lee K. Abbott--I'll keep an eye out!
Seven collections of short stories. Appeared in Harpers, New York Times, The Atlantic -- pretty much, you name it ...
Oh boy, this was basically the prerequisite reading for my senior thesis on the Role of Gordon Lish on Literary Minimalism. Even establishing a baseline definition was such a pain in the butt, because scholars and critics would point to modernists like Hemingway or something, and they simply didn't fit.
If you're curious about Carver's contemporaries and other people that emerged from the school of Lish, consider looking at Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, Mary Robison (?), as well as Carver's own pedagogical spawn, Denis Johnson.
I'm on that family tree too, way way down.
I have a collection by Ann Beattie (The New Yorker stories) that looks interesting. I also want to check out Denis Johnson--another writer I feel like I've read but which I haven't actually. The other names are ones I've heard of but haven't read much of.
Why doesn’t the Hemingway of eg The Old Man and the Sea count as minimalism?
Hemingway wrote short sentences for the time - and even then that's debatable - but he wasn't very good at limiting and morphing his elements, or even limiting the scope of his characters' knowledge and texturing the language they used to reflect their expertise.
I think people called him minimalist because of how he used subtext. Looking at Hills like White Elephants, the top story is just a couple speaking in a train station. The understory is two people who probably don't even love each other, trying to figure out whether or not to get an abortion before they part ways forever.
I’ve never read Raymond Carver and found this article interesting. Thanks.