MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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The revised stories even get different titles; thus "Dummy" becomes
"The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off," and "Distance" turns
into "Everything Stuck to Him." The third story, "So Much Water So
Close to Home," keeps its title but loses three-quarters of its text, as if a
Giacometti sculpting with words had hacked away at it in a wild frenzy.
It becomes skeletal, fragmentary, discontinuous, detached from all
explanation: the enigmatic, boiled-down essence of the story it had been.
The characters are the same, even the "story" is the same, but now the
meaning must take shape in the mind of the reader; it's nowhere explicit
in the words on the page.
In Carver's work, the surreal, associative logic of a Barthelme col–
lage has infiltrated the terrain of a minute domestic realism, making it
wild and jazzy and grimly comical. Just as there is an infinite sadness
buried in Barthelme's worldliness and cultivation, there's a zany nihilistic
humor at the heart of Carver's low-rent tragedies. Malamud and
Cheever, like their great contemporary Flannery O'Connor, were masters
of the kind of story that could say so much so quickly, stories that were
perfectly condensed, lapidary, wise. Barthelme and Carver, in their
different ways, took the story into a period when writers understood less
and less of what was happening, when all meanings were a jumble and
short takes became attractive because they were modest and fragmentary,
and took so little purchase on reality. Carver's so-called minimalism - its
implications were anything but minimal - was perfectly suited to a pe–
riod when Americans were lowering their expectations, learning to live
with limitation, to make fewer demands in their own lives.
In the last phase of his career, before he died in 1988, Carver him–
self changed. As his own life grew happier, as the nation itself, led by a
relentless cheerleader, began recovering some of its morale, his stories
became longer, less cacophonous, more fluent and optimistic. In his final
revisions Carver now began to add, not to subtract. "Distance" recov–
ered its title and some of its lost text. Only two years after it appeared,
one of his saddest stories, "The Bath," became "A Small, Good Thing,"
one of his most quietly affirmative. Here, the accidental death of a young
boy, so harsh and meaningless in the earlier text, sets the stage for a mo–
ment of quiet human contact as Carver shows us how life goes on, even
for the bereaved parents.
Carver's last story, "Errand," is about the death of Chekhov, but
even more about the glass of champagne he drinks before his death, and
about the doctor and the woman at his bedside, and especially about the
room-service boy who brings the bottle. Soon to be facing death
himself, Carver focused on survival - yet also, true to himself, emphasized
the banal details that make death and survival more bearable, more
ordinary . At the end Carver sacrificed the spareness of Hemingway (the
