What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver. Pub 1981

This book – the copy I read – was my pop’s. He was a big short story lover, favouring the works of Raymond Carver and Anton Chekov, among others. This book is part of the small collection my sister has kept from his effects. When we were going through them a while ago, I asked to bring this one home to read.

The stories are both of their time and timeless. The settings and characters are very 1970s – working dads and stay-at-home moms, kids running amok. The stories are quite short, ~10 pages each (one is just 2 pages), and somehow are immediately engaging and sticky, such that they return to you long after you’ve read them. Few of them are happy stories, and even the happier ones have a melancholic streak. These are people lost without meaning, unsure of who they are meant to be, and letting apathy, loss, or violence consume them. But that doesn’t make the stories morose or unappealing – in fact, these glimpses into so many lives of despondency and small hopes are haunting and inviting.

The titular story is the longest of them, and familiar to anyone who’s seen the film Birdman. It was good, but not the best of these. My favourites were “Why Don’t You Dance?”, about a man emptying his house of possessions for an unknown reason and the young couple who happen upon his saddest yard sale, and “So Much Water So Close to Home”, about a woman trying to understand her husband’s foolish choice. The story, “The Bath”, was very familiar – turns out the film Short Cuts is based on several Carver stories all intertwined, and this was one of them.

In the title story, there is a line that reminded me of Pop. Mel (the cardiologist) says, apropos of nothing, “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be a chef, you know?” I know Pop had the same alternate plan. He loved to cook, had spent some time years ago in an apprentice-type role in a restaurant, and at the end of his life was scheduled to be taking courses and more apprenticing in a restaurant. Like I said, haunting.

I’m glad I finally read this, and I’ll likely eventually read another Carver and perhaps some Checkov, too.

Fate: I’ll be hanging on to this one.

1 – a murder
12 – a book I should read
18 – short stories
25 – new author to me