Raymond Carver

Wednesday

Benjamin Myers

The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed

Were arriving aliens to be introduced to the concept of the USA via the work of Willy Vlautin, they would find a country populated by quiet people enduring quiet struggles. Family dysfunction, the repetitiveness of minimum-wage work, crushing loneliness and the detailed grind of daily existence (rarely has a writer said so much through groceries bought and meals cooked) are dominant themes, though always backlit by the suggestion that goodness prevails. Even entertaining the idea of the American Dream is an indulgence when the reality of simple survival is far more urgent. In this sense Vlautin is the son of John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver.

Thursday

Alex Perez

Dirty realists

From our US edition

I recently finished yet another predictable novel about Brooklyn neurotics and needed a gritty palate cleanser. Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories seemed ideal. Carver, a master of the short-story form, has long been one of my go-to writers, but, in recent years, he has increasingly lost literary relevance. Twenty years ago, Carver’s terse, minimalistic style was all the rage. Like Hemingway and Bukowski, Carver birthed a sea of mediocre imitators onto the American literary scene. In most US short-story collections published in the Eighties or Nineties, Carver’s stylistic and thematic influence is evident from the first page.

realists