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.
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.
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've been an appreciator of Carver for about 30 years now, even since I heard the buzz around him at my small liberal arts college. Then I found a copy of "What We Talk About" in a North Side Chicago used bookstore. This must have been summer 1997. A couple of my professors were big fans, though it was more of a niche thing. Actually, people tended to talk about the idea of craft when talking about Carver, and in this way the Carverites comprised a small 'c' conservative wing of English departments that were already becoming hyper liberal.
I teach college students now, and it's really difficult to assign even "Cathedral" (the story) today (or anything written before, say, 2000, unless it's Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, or Sandra Cisneros).
The last time I assigned it (a couple years ago), I asked the students if they thought the narrator changed in an authentic, lasting way at the end of the story and then told them to vote with their feet, with the "yes" people going to one side and the "no" people going to the other. The 17 women in the class went with the "no" and the three men in the class went with the "yes." Then, each group constructed an argument to justify their position so they could debate the other group. The "yes" men were able to convince one of the wavering "no" women of their position. It was actually kind of fun, though in retrospect it's depressing to be reminded of the gender divide problem.
That's a very telling anecdote. It is depressing how skeptical young women are of any redemptive narrative involving a man.
I was at a book club recently where we read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and it was striking how much Bazarov gave the young women "the ick." To be fair he rubs other characters the wrong way, but I found him to be a complex and tragic character.
I wonder what they'd make of The Color Purple, written by a black woman, and containing a pretty nasty male character who gets some degree of redemption.
I might be wrong but I think what was more hinted at than explicitly said in this essay is that Lish’s editing helped make Carver’s characters into middle/upper class aspirants versus working class comrades. The warmth he removed is, to me, the key indication of working class. You can be poor, middle class, or even upper class (to a degree) in income, but if you act upon a deep desire to bridge interpersonal connections as a form of currency rather than money or assets, even with people you may be suspicious of or may hold as an enemy as in “Cathedral,” you are acting in a more working class manner—you are trying to stand by people over what they produce. Upper classes are cold to others because their money lets them define people by what utility they have. When Lish edited the stories to be more cold, he was editing characters into ostensibly wanting to be more like the upper classes despite their lower class resonances, rather than letting them be content with or show appreciation of their working class values. He turned the characters into the self-interested, American dream-pilled strivers that boomers are often portrayed as, it seems to me. In this way, he made the elite people the ones who understand well the codes of the working class but want a “better,” more independent (rather than interdependent) life—artists often sit in this category, hence the adoption of Carver into the literary world and MFA culture.
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!
Was waiting for this article and it didn't disappoint. I had heard about the collaboration between Lish and Carver, but I had no idea the cuts and modifications were this extreme!
I like how you set the context of the article by explaining Carver's importance to certain institutions. When you say Carver's form of story is evergreen but difficult to publish in traditional literary journals, is that a comment on the form being dated or about journals looking for something else? What are they looking for these days, and why doesn't this evergreen form sell?
As for abrupt endings, the boy holding up the head of a fish in "Nobody said anything" has got to be my favorite.
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.
I think there is “no more frontier” when it comes to formal innovation in a lot of media, including the short story. So when we say as consumers or critics “give me newness or I’m not interested/impressed”, what we’re really saying is “this medium is no longer relevant “. And then we turn around and bemoan the fact that it’s so hard to make a living as a writer/painter/whatever.
This is terrific. I only knew of this editorial divide because The New Yorker re-printed "What We Talk About..." and included a fascinating red-pen graphic accompanying the text. Strikethroughs and editorial notes and insertions. Letting the reader see for themselves, thirty years hence, how dramatic the changes were.
But ever since then I've had this distorted sense of Carver as someone who *might* be great or *might not* be great, and the friction there has admittedly kept me from exploring his work more deeply (a personal hangup, about divvying up time among "worthwhile" books, that's making me excited for your book about classics next year). You've done a great job here of showing that he isn't one or the other, but a kind of embattled figure in between those two "Carver"s. The comparisons here are elucidating too--and while I'm inclined toward your own reaction, re: the very abrupt and suggestive endings, I see something...semi-compelling about how earnest Carver's originals were.
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.
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.
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've been an appreciator of Carver for about 30 years now, even since I heard the buzz around him at my small liberal arts college. Then I found a copy of "What We Talk About" in a North Side Chicago used bookstore. This must have been summer 1997. A couple of my professors were big fans, though it was more of a niche thing. Actually, people tended to talk about the idea of craft when talking about Carver, and in this way the Carverites comprised a small 'c' conservative wing of English departments that were already becoming hyper liberal.
I teach college students now, and it's really difficult to assign even "Cathedral" (the story) today (or anything written before, say, 2000, unless it's Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, or Sandra Cisneros).
The last time I assigned it (a couple years ago), I asked the students if they thought the narrator changed in an authentic, lasting way at the end of the story and then told them to vote with their feet, with the "yes" people going to one side and the "no" people going to the other. The 17 women in the class went with the "no" and the three men in the class went with the "yes." Then, each group constructed an argument to justify their position so they could debate the other group. The "yes" men were able to convince one of the wavering "no" women of their position. It was actually kind of fun, though in retrospect it's depressing to be reminded of the gender divide problem.
p.s. I really enjoyed this piece. I always knew about the Lish effect, though I didn't realize it was this drastic.
That's a very telling anecdote. It is depressing how skeptical young women are of any redemptive narrative involving a man.
I was at a book club recently where we read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and it was striking how much Bazarov gave the young women "the ick." To be fair he rubs other characters the wrong way, but I found him to be a complex and tragic character.
I wonder what they'd make of The Color Purple, written by a black woman, and containing a pretty nasty male character who gets some degree of redemption.
I like the yes/no to discuss a story. I want in! But yeah, lame about the gender divide. Where would the trans kid stand?
I might be wrong but I think what was more hinted at than explicitly said in this essay is that Lish’s editing helped make Carver’s characters into middle/upper class aspirants versus working class comrades. The warmth he removed is, to me, the key indication of working class. You can be poor, middle class, or even upper class (to a degree) in income, but if you act upon a deep desire to bridge interpersonal connections as a form of currency rather than money or assets, even with people you may be suspicious of or may hold as an enemy as in “Cathedral,” you are acting in a more working class manner—you are trying to stand by people over what they produce. Upper classes are cold to others because their money lets them define people by what utility they have. When Lish edited the stories to be more cold, he was editing characters into ostensibly wanting to be more like the upper classes despite their lower class resonances, rather than letting them be content with or show appreciation of their working class values. He turned the characters into the self-interested, American dream-pilled strivers that boomers are often portrayed as, it seems to me. In this way, he made the elite people the ones who understand well the codes of the working class but want a “better,” more independent (rather than interdependent) life—artists often sit in this category, hence the adoption of Carver into the literary world and MFA culture.
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.
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!
Was waiting for this article and it didn't disappoint. I had heard about the collaboration between Lish and Carver, but I had no idea the cuts and modifications were this extreme!
I like how you set the context of the article by explaining Carver's importance to certain institutions. When you say Carver's form of story is evergreen but difficult to publish in traditional literary journals, is that a comment on the form being dated or about journals looking for something else? What are they looking for these days, and why doesn't this evergreen form sell?
As for abrupt endings, the boy holding up the head of a fish in "Nobody said anything" has got to be my favorite.
“Neighbors” is a great Carver story. Taut, surprising, interesting
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.
Of everything of yours I've read over the past few years, this might be my favorite.
I think there is “no more frontier” when it comes to formal innovation in a lot of media, including the short story. So when we say as consumers or critics “give me newness or I’m not interested/impressed”, what we’re really saying is “this medium is no longer relevant “. And then we turn around and bemoan the fact that it’s so hard to make a living as a writer/painter/whatever.
This is so great. I love learning stuff from you I didn't even know I'd be interested in!
This is terrific. I only knew of this editorial divide because The New Yorker re-printed "What We Talk About..." and included a fascinating red-pen graphic accompanying the text. Strikethroughs and editorial notes and insertions. Letting the reader see for themselves, thirty years hence, how dramatic the changes were.
But ever since then I've had this distorted sense of Carver as someone who *might* be great or *might not* be great, and the friction there has admittedly kept me from exploring his work more deeply (a personal hangup, about divvying up time among "worthwhile" books, that's making me excited for your book about classics next year). You've done a great job here of showing that he isn't one or the other, but a kind of embattled figure in between those two "Carver"s. The comparisons here are elucidating too--and while I'm inclined toward your own reaction, re: the very abrupt and suggestive endings, I see something...semi-compelling about how earnest Carver's originals were.