Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? - Raymond Carver

This is the first collection of short stories from Raymond Carver. The characters are normal people, and the events in the stories are ordinary events, but Carver manages to observe them in a way which is poignant and moving, and at times comic and at others melancholy.

This is a collection of 21 stories written from 1960 to 1974, some of which had been published elsewhere previously. The stories are more or less a consistent length, mostly taking about 10 minutes to read each one. It was important to Carver to keep them snippy - he wanted to write them in a single sitting, and for the reader to read them in a single sitting - and each one of these stories needs to be read in it's entirety in one go. Carver focused on intensity, and he squeezes buckets out of everyday situations. There is a subtlety throughout each one, often the true plot of the story or the real conclusion isn't revealed until the last paragraph or in some cases even the last line, and even then not everything is clear at first glance. For example, and please excuse the following spoiler, in the first story, Fat, in which a waitress is telling her friend about a weighty customer she had in that day. She tells her friend about the whole interaction, going in detail about the mannerisms and the physical struggle of the customer. At the end, in the last few paragraphs, she thinks about how she had sex with her boyfriend and imagined herself getting larger, and says the line "My life is going to change. I can feel it". Leaving the reader to come to the conclusion she is pregnant, and thinking about her future. It captures the excitement and uncertainty of a newly pregnant woman excellently and sets the reader up for the style of the rest of the stories here.

Carver's style is extremely understated and it keeps the reader engrossed. After finishing almost all of these stories I needed to take a minute and think about what had happened and process it all. Carver  introduces us into the lives of his characters, often not explaining the situation, and letting it come clear in it's own time, the stories unfolding naturally around us, then at the end it's all given some sort of meaning. One of the things that struck me reading this book is the flexibility in Carver's writing. He jumps into different styles effortlessly and seamlessly. One minute the narrator is a bored middle aged housewife, worrying about the neighbours, the next he is a chatty post man talking his divroce and an odd family on his route, then a horny, rebellious teenager who only thinks about fishing and masturbating. This gives the stories variety and keeps the books readable. I'm trying to think of other author's who have the ability to step into their character's shoes in the way Carver does here, and to be honest I'm struggling to think of any. 

Carver referred to the time he wrote these stories as his "Bad Raymond Days," or his "First Life". He was too busy drinking himself to near death and cheating on his wife to get much writing done, which is why these stories span 14 years of work (he later sobered up). They had a huge impact though, and while drinking himself silly Carver managed to inspire many writers to reconsider the short story, and some critics claim he breathed new life into the format. Knowing about his drinking and his infidelity does maybe give some of these stories a certain darker side - is the story about a husband discovering his wife's affair partly inspired by real life events? What about the story of the old man considering cheating on his faithful wife? 

So is it any good? Immensely. In a collection of 21 stories I would expect a few duds, and while some here are better than others, none of them are bad at all. They're all great. The writing is phenomenal and Carver's ability to find meaning and tragedy and comedy in normal life is uncanny - a real talent.