BOOKS
625
ABSENT TALKERS
What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love.
By Raymond
Carver.
Knopf. $9.95.
It seems odd that stories that are all of talk should be muf–
fled by a roominess of silence. The unsaid makes a vacuum in the
middle of the language into which the meaning of the talkers' exist–
ence is sucked. The flotsam, the drift of American life, is not repre–
sented in a
trap-plein,
a spillover of language as in Barthelme , for
instance, but in a loss, a stripping down, a mine stripping of the
voice, a minus sign, a subtraction from the language. The linguistic
space of the stories is mostly margin: the whiteness of the page that
follows each attempt a t speech swallows the words. In "So Much
Water So Close to Home" the narrator's husband has returned from
a weekend fishing trip with his buddies . At the river site they had
found the naked body of a girl floating near shore caught in
branches , which they did not report until two days later on their
return. In the midst of the gossip and newspaper reports, husband
and wife are locked in speech incommunicado.
" What are you staring at me for? " he says. " What is it ;>" he
says and lays down his fork.
" Was I staring?" I say, and shake my head .
The telephone rings.
"Don't answer it ," he says.
" It
might be your mother," I say.
"Watch and see," he says.
In the blanks, what is not said presses about the lonely fIgures
of Carver's stories. The silence that seeps in on the voices is the cir–
cumstance, the climate of the voice in America, its authenticity
devastated by the detritus of mass culture. In "Gazebo," a couple
managing a motel lock themselves in and potential guests out fo llow–
ing her discovery of his infidelity, in a ritual of purgation and separa–
tion:
" .. Who knows what I was missing all those years? You were
my everything, just like the song."
