Word: blood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...West are as inevitable as passin' out after you drink eight Pabst Blue Ribbons in 15 minutes. Part of th' reason is that th' characters are all so damn self-destructive. Curse is about a family whose members have what one of them describes as "poison" in th' blood. They're alcoholic, they're violent, they're venal, they're ornery...
...reason they're doomed, besides th' "poison" in their blood, is what one of 'em calls th' "creeping disease" that infects th' whole West. That means these people are poor and stupid. You know they're poor 'cause their fridge is empty, n' you know they're stupid 'cause they open th' fridge door about every three minutes, as if somethin' would have appeared in there since th' last time they looked...
There are, of course, other victims: intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, infants condemned in the wombs of diseased mothers, and patients who received tainted blood transfusions. This last category provides the subject of one of the first AIDS novels, Alice Hoffman's At Risk (Putnam; 219 pages; $17.95), a suburban drama about an eleven-year-old schoolgirl gymnast who is inadvertently doomed during a routine appendectomy...
Carver would never bury a sentence like "Suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth" in the middle of a lengthy paragraph. Nor would Carver use a phrase like "Suddenly, without warning" in one of his own stories, because, in addition to the dated gentility of the phrase, it is redundant. Furthermore, in his homage to Chekhov, Carver adopts a pace that is not as tight as his own, a pace that surveys each scene with caution and scrutiny before proceeding...
...clunky style of "Errand" is a throwback to the 19th century, but "Errand" is an experiment, a post-modern experiment, on the border between fiction and non-fiction. Capote's In Cold Blood and, more recently, Don DeLillo's Libra are other examples of the post-modern urge to cross genres and mix fact with fiction. Seen in this light, "Errand" is not a return of older influences, it is a departure from the rigid prohibitions that minimalism can impose...