Raymond Carver’s short stories are known for their gritty honesty, their refusal to airbrush the lives of twentieth-century working class Americans. The style—attributed to Carver—came to be known as “Dirty Realism,” and it spawned a generation of writers like Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Cormac McCarthy to veer that direction in literary fiction.
Raymond Carver Disliked the Dirty Realism Label
Carver himself disliked the too-easy, overly simplified term. As far as he was concerned, he was “writing what he knew,” one of the cardinal rules of fiction, taught to him by his first creative writing instructor, John Gardner. Readers familiar with Carver’s stories—“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “A Small, Good Thing,” “Cathedral,” among dozens—already know that, if this was the author’s world, it was a fairly bleak one.
Carol Sklenica’s 2009 biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life uncovers those details behind what the renowned author “knew,” and it is, for the most part, not a pretty picture. Like so many of his characters, Carver’s life was dominated by booze and cigarettes, failed marriage and constant money problems, uncertainty and failure.
Like Carver Himself, Biographer Sklenica Doesn’t Sugarcoat
To Sklenica’s credit, she follows her subject’s lead in her refusal to shine things up a bit. This is a “warts and all” biography, as it should be, and while redemption does find its place in Carver’s life and career, it seems to come so late that the reader cannot help but feel the frustration Carver himself must have. That’s what a biography should do.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life is meticulously researched and written; there doesn’t seem to be week of his adult life left out. Two of the defining relationships of Carver’s relatively short life (he died in 1988 at age 50), were those with first wife Maryann and Esquire editor Gordon Lish. Sklenica aptly delves deeply into each.
Editor Gordon Lish Took Credit For Ray Carver’s Success
Since Carver’s death, much has been made of the influence Lish had over the writer and his work. Early on in their writer/editor relationship, Lish made such wholesale changes to Carver’s stories (and Carver was so itchy to be published that he accepted them) that the cocky editor later took most of the credit for the author’s success.
It was a tricky relationship, as most of those involving Ray Carver seemed to be. In particular, readers may be dismayed by the short-change Carver’s two children (and finally, his ever-supportive wife) received in favor of his career. On the other hand, Carver nurtured literary relationships. Each is extensively covered in Sklenica’s biography.
Overall, Carol Sklenica’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life has the feel of a text that will come to be accepted as the definitive biography of Raymond Carver’s life. In both its extensiveness and insight, it’s hard to imagine learning more about Carver, except, of course, through his marvelous body of work.
Sklenica, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 2009, Simon & Schuster, 578 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7432-6245-3.
Dale Van Every - Dale Van Every is a freelance and fiction writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his Masters Degree in English Literature from ...
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