Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) by Raymond Carver

One day a thousand years from now, whoever is living on this planet will unearth some of Carver's short stories from some old, burned out bookshop they've just excavated. They'll get to work meticulously translating it and they'll learn everything they need to know about latter-half 20th century American culture just from his work. Raymond Carver is our Geoffrey Chaucer and his short stories are our Canterbury Tales. He reminds me of Ernest Hemingway in that his work is almost always more than the sum of its parts. His prose is simple, dirty, and direct. But what he says with it is profound in his muted way. Reading him feels like brushing your hand against some dirty slate, or chucking an old, broken cinder block into a refuse pile. His short fiction is the holey work glove of 20th century American literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. If Hemingway had lived forever, perhaps Raymond Carver is what the injuries and trials of later life would have crushed him into.

Carver manages to capture everything about daily American ennui with such sparseness and subtlety; our insecurities and failures, our hopes and dreams, our faded love for one-another and our boredom and lack of inspiration. These stories are no more than vignettes into everyday working class life, but they're often so poignant and relatable for that. Carver's characters feel so real, sad, detestable, and pitiable. Mostly insecure, unsuccessful, cigarette-ash-covered and beer-soaked middle-aged men, they feel like your creepy uncle. Everybody has the unfortunate privilege of knowing somebody like these characters. So many of them have this putrid, embarrassing artery of insecurity running through every fiber of their being and polluting everything they do. You can trace it from their actions back down to their core like branches to the trunk of a tree. Their insecurity damages everything around them.

In the story They're Not Your Husband, Earl's insecurity tears his wife down—seemingly a hard-working, earnest woman, at least from what we're shown. It's painful for us to witness, and even harsher when considering how real it feels, despite being fiction. It begs us to question Earl, himself: Is this a man who's down on his luck, as it would seem? Or is this perhaps a man whose own shallow, passive aggressive actions have led to his unemployment? Maybe it's so affecting because we can all see traces of ourselves, at our worst, in Carver's characters. Like looking into a filthy mirror. Carver makes sure to get out of the way and let his characters do the talking with simplistic, direct prose and dialogue. And his stories are more affecting for it.

I discovered him via an interest in Haruki Murakami's work and hearing that Carver's short fiction was a strong influence on him, and never is this clearer than in the story Are You A Doctor? A phone call from a strange woman, a chance encounter peppered with romanticism... And someone making tea.

These sorts of chance encounters and the mystery that accompanies them are now a thing of the past, and the mystery that makes them provocative is somewhat lost on those of us living in the modern world, in which any name can be googled in ten seconds on a smartphone. A phone call from a stranger will never again be as mysterious as it once was, but Carver's story helps those raised in the era of smartphones understand how dangerous and compelling such a meeting once was.

Another story titled Nobody Said Anything features an expertly crafted narrative voice of your typical hormone-flooded teenage boy—a horny, lonely creature playing hooky from school and searching for something that would more entertainingly occupy his worthless time. The kid's loneliness goes from typical to pitiable to depressing over the short course of the narrative. The closing lines of the story manage to flip our feeling of him completely from mild disgust to pity.

Civilization's continuing consumption and desolation of nature seemed to be a theme running through the undercurrent of the story. The airport encroaches on the creek the boy fishes to such an extent that the fish are bloated and unrecognizable, its waters are ground down to a slimy trickle when they used to be surging and flush with healthy fish. The boys' fishing represents this as well, as they gleefully and methodically pursue their warped prey in order to kill and dismember it in a fashion that renders their actions more savage than you'd expect. It feels like Tom Sawyer written in the dark, postmodern hopelessness of Cormac McCarthy rather than the satirical gallows humor of Mark Twain.

What's in Alaska features more humor than most of the others, which was a nice change of pace. Many of Carver's stories are so bleak and grey that it helps to have a palate cleanser once in a while. I also enjoyed the layers to this one, as it's heavily hinted that one of the characters is cheating on another with a third.
My overall favorite is probably Jerry and Molly and Sam which sees a man decide to abandon the family dog, eventually ending in his experiencing an epiphany. The story is so heartrending and the change in the narrator is so genuine and real that finishing it left me reeling. I had to set the book down and take a break afterwards just to think about it, and it's amazing to me that a story clocking in at fewer than 20 pages can have such an effect.

There's always a lot packed in to the few pages Carver dedicates to each story. I never feel good after reading him, but that's not really the point. I don't think 'fun' is the right word to describe his stories, but there is joy in reading them for me—perhaps because I'm in a better place in my life now but can still easily recognize poorer times passed in which I felt bled through with the same negative emotions and existential anxiety that these characters seem to, and I can subconsciously, optimistically urge them onward towards more hopeful, carefree lifestyles once they become more aged. So reading them is cathartic and—unexpectedly—generates optimism within me.

The value of good literature is that it imparts life experience onto us. It allows us to live and feel life situations we'd never experience ourselves. And although some of these early stories are a bit too subtle for their own good, Carver's still excellent at drawing emotion from the reader with so little. Even past death he continues to create a love for the medium of the short story within his readers regardless of demographics and interests. He's certainly done so for me over the past year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Call for the Dead (1961) (George Smiley, #1) by John le Carré

My second le Carré novel—the author's first—had a notably lighter impact on me than my introduction to the man's work, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Call for the Dead is noteworthy in that it's such a polished first novel. It reads quite quickly and le Carré's prose is surprisingly polished for a new novelist. I suspect the man had been nursing his talent for quite some time, perhaps with other methods. But what made The Spy Who Came In From The Cold so compelling to me—its gritty realism, the undertones of what motivates one to live such a difficult life as one lived by a spy, and its compelling characters—are present here, albeit in early form, somewhat like the tip of the iceberg that would be revealed in the coming, more polished novels in the Smiley series.

George Smiley is the main draw of this novel. Gone are the super-spies we know now—the Bournes and Bonds and various other hip, muscular, shirtless Bees—and we're left with a short, fat, poorly dressed, bespectacled, middle-aged man whose only worthwhile weapon is his mind. Smiley (who made only a peripheral appearance in the other novel I've read) is a joy to read. His analytical mind walks us tradecraft-neophytes through the potential motivations for the people he's examining in a studious, workmanlike manner, and we never feel left out of the know as to why he's performing the actions he is.

Perhaps most enjoyable for me were the asides in which Smiley dipped into his and his adversaries' political motivations for doing what they do. le Carré's characters feel like real people with real wants who end up desperate and trapped in the world in which they've come to reside. The antagonists are not flag-waving Marxists or steel-jawed monsters who kill at whim. The best of them are cold professionals. But more importantly, they're real, disillusioned people doing what they can to enact the drastic changes in the world they'd like to see. This humanity makes them relatable, and even pitiable. Although initially cast as villains; you end up feeling sorry for them rather than rooting against them. And it's a credit to le Carré's skill that this turn never feels cloying nor manipulative. My favorite characters are always those I don't necessarily agree with, but am still capable of empathizing with. And in this, more than nearly anything else in his work, le Carré succeeds.

A young John le Carré

Although I enjoyed it, I think Call for the Dead, overall, does feel a bit thin. There are elements of Smiley's frustration in dealing with the stifling bureaucracy and rampant idiocy within his own organization that immediately interested me but were never touched on again past the first few chapters. And some of the side characters—Guillam, most notably—were left distinctly underdeveloped despite playing a considerable role in the climax, which caused it to lack a bit of the impact it could have had.

When you consider its status as le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead is still quite impressive regardless of these flaws. But rating on its own merit leads me to classify it more as a longish novella than a full novel of its own account. That said, it's a marvelous first effort, and I'll definitely be reading the rest of the George Smiley books. le Carré has me hooked.

⭐⭐⭐

QUOTES LIKED

“But gossip must see its characters
in black and white, equip them with
sins and motives easily conveyed in
the shorthand of conversation.”

“His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.”

“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed.”

“Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective.”

“They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it.”