Word: carvers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This much tragedy, in the hands of a less capable author, could easily become bathos. But Carver's characters cling to what they have so earnestly that no reader can dismiss them. They are up against the wall, but they haven't given up. They are still hoping for some transcendence, some moment of connection, even if the connection has to cross 20 years of failed marriage and distrust...
...epiphany, which Carver's characters depend on, is the creature of Modernism; post-modernists are supposed to get beyond it somehow, as writers like Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, and Robert Coover have demonstrated. Carver's faith in the epiphany is a throwback to an earlier way of thinking about fiction. He believes in telling a story plainly and completely. Carver's stories follow a discipline that seems to come out of necessity. His stories just barely escape the desperate world that they describe. There's no artifice--Carver wouldn't pass off a "Project for a Trip to China" (Sontag...
...first, Carver's plain style sounds a lot like Hemingway in his short stories. (Carver has written poetry but has never written a novel.) There's a similar use of ellipsis. "A Small, Good Thing" has the seductively simple ring of Hemingway titles like "The End of Something" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." And the men in Where I'm Calling From hunt, fish, drink and brawl. But although Hemingway's men adopt a tough exterior in order to hide when life or women get them down, Carver's men remain vulnerable, as husbands or fathers, and risk compassion...
...both authors, reticence is linked to a code of honor, to an idea of courage that requires accepting misfortune without complaint. The code is not necessarily a male code with Carver; the women (in "Careful," for example) are often more stoic than their men. In narrative style, Carver believes in saying less. He has been called the founder of the new Minimalism, or, according to Granta, Dirty Realism, whose followers include Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tobias Wolff and Bobbie Ann Mason...
...would be wrong to attribute to Carver or to the loose group of "Dirty Realists" a militant rejection of the rococo experimentation that was rampant in American fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s, but their spareness could easily be a reaction, militant...