Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I wonder if opening sentences give writers ulcers? How do you open a book so that the reader will be compelled to keep reading? In this collection of short stories, Raymond Carver shows you how it's done:


"In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard."

"A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house."


"That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off."


"I'll tell you what did my father in."

Really, you have to read the whole story once you read the opening line. You have no choice. But it's okay, because these stories are all worth reading.  They stay with you in unexpected ways.

I have nothing new to say about Carver's writing. It is spare and sparse and pared down and cut to the bone. It is straight to the point. Lean and er, Hemingwayesque, if that is a word.

I think that I like books written in this way. "Write it all down. Just the truth. No rhymes, no embellishments, no adjectives. And then leave us be."  Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) says that in the movie version of Atonement. (Is that in the book? I don't remember, and don't have it handy.) 

My only serious problem with What We Talk About is that the cover is so damned ugly. A hideously dated 80's title font over top a muddy and confused and badly cropped watercolour painting. I should have waited for the new Carver reissues from Vintage. They have moody, brooding, evocative photos by Todd Hido on the cover, and a more classic and muted title font.

On the other hand, the Library of America has just put out a comprehensive, one-volume collection of Carver's work. It includes all of his stories and the original manuscript for one of his books. Apparently, Carver's original text for What We Talk About was savagely reworked and whittled down by his editor, Gordon Lish. There is a longstanding literary argument about this. Was it really Lish who was responsible for everything we love about Carver? Was Carver a genius who's work was rewritten and stripped of it's humanist soul by the overzealous Lish?

I'm not sure if I like the idea of reading the original manuscript for What We Talk About. I know that all books were once works in progress and were likely written and rewritten before being published. But I feel like seeing how it was all put together might somehow ruin my experience of the final book. ("It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?! You stupid monkey!!")