In Summary

So, you want to be a writer?  That's cute.  Why?  Oh.  You want to tell the world something?  You want to share?  That's cute.  What is it you want to share?  Your sense of irony?  Your command of the language?  Your ability to create believable characters?  Your craftsmanship?  Yep, that too is cute.

What Raymond Carver does is deliver you into a land of ineffectiveness.  It is a land in which no one gets it.  No one can do what they want.  Everyone is trapped.  Everyone is following the white line straight to doom and there is no stopping them.  The doom is often a mundane doom involving financial ruin or divorce but it is such an obviously avoidable yet entirely predestined doom that the ordinariness of it all takes on a grandiose cloak of angels blowing horns, seventh seals cracking and the four horsemen serving you your final meal.

These stories are, in a word, amazing.

There's something especially impressive about great art that describes the mundane so very well.  This isn't to say that there's not great art about the unusual and epic elements of life - there certainly is.  All too often, though, the trappings of the unusual become the crutch of a story.  Throw in some swearwords and violence and you're bound to have at least a small audience.  Toss in a couple dragons and a time machine and you've hooked a few folks.  But write about a door to door carpet salesman or a couple that manages a seedy motel?  That kind of subject matter on its own gets you pretty much nobody.  That's probably not true but dammit I'm just desperate for a way to explain how good these stories are when they are about such miserable people in such stupid circumstances.

Perhaps it's that everyman thing.  We all make stupid mistakes.  We all put ourselves in stupid situations.  We all see the obvious solutions and willfully ignore them.  We are all (at least most of us, statistically speaking) pretty damn average.

I guess what I mean is that this is a book in praise of folly.  Except unlike sitcoms which make you feel better about yourself as you watch people do obviously stupid things over and over, these stories make you wonder about all the choices you have, are and will make in your life.  Read it.