… When We Talk About Raymond Carver ed. by Sam Halpert

Abstract

Reviews 249 between—are “thoroughly in the modern idiom: condensed, allusive, suggest­ ing the larger structures of existence beneath trivial incident.” JOAN WYLIE HALL University ofMississippi . . . When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Edited by Sam Halpert. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. 179 pages, $17.95.) In interviews conducted by Sam Halpert between October 1989 and De­ cember 1990 with Tess Gallagher, Maryann Carver, and nine writers who were Raymond Carver’s closest friends and colleagues, the portrait of an artist merges with husband, teacher, and friend. Revelations of these individuals re­ create the private and professional Carver from his teenage marriage to Maryann through the development of the artist and alcoholism of the “bad old Raymond”years and into the last decade of stability, achievement, recognition, and final illness. Halpert’s well-conceived questions and ability to hear the responses of the wives and Richard Ford, Chuck Kinder, William Kittredge, Jay Mclnerney, Leonard Michaels, Robert Stone, Douglas Unger, Geoffrey Wolff, and Tobias Wolff produce a readable and rewarding study of Carver’s teaching, social and family life, and career aswriter. Topics such as Carver’sficdon as autobiography or as the embodiment of minimalism or metafiction are debated and its change from bare, lean prose to a superior—fuller, richer, more spiritual—art are agreed upon. Ford contends that with “Errand,”Carver “was feeling ... a kind of exhilaration, a freedom which would’ve resulted in wonderful work.”Ford also connects Carver’s “more ample stories” with his “more comfortable and ample life.” Kittredge agrees that Carver was changing directions, having “ex­ plored the old orientation as far as he wanted to” and “trying to enlarge his scope on alarger stage”before his death. Several refer to the poetry ofCarver as something he loved and something that came easier to him than his stories. Numerous anecdotes about Carver’s family, teaching, recreation (fishing was a serious activity), and work reflect what Tobias Wolffperceives as a quality many of his ficdonal characters possess—“the virtue of endurance,just staying alive in this world.” These accounts—often outrageously funny, occasionally violent—suggest that Carver celebrated his life, valued his friendships, appreci­ ated his success as a writer, and cherished his victory over alcoholism as the means to new life. While this collection of interviews lacks an index, a chronology of events, and a list of Carver’s works, attributes of Gentry and Stull’s Conversations with Raymond Carver (1990), it contains insight and new information useful to the Carver scholar. Of particular merit are the interviews with Ford, Carver, Gallagher, Unger, and the Wolffs. DELORES WASHBURN Hardin-Simmons University 250 WesternAmerican Literature Mary Austin: Song ofa Maverick. By Esther Lanigan Stineman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 269 pages, $25.00.) “Mary Hunter Austin’s voice,” Esther Stineman asserts in her new biogra­ phy, “is one of the most unusual, gifted, eccentric, exasperating, tragic, enig­ matic, elitist, and idiosyncratic in American literature.” Despite this adjectival exuberance, Stineman’s own voice as biographer never quite brings her contro­ versial subject to life. The author of more than thirty books and a forceful advocate of women’s and Indians’ rights, ecological awareness and the preservation of indigenous American cultures, Austin was a complex personality. A feminist who often preferred the society of men—especialy ‘Jovian”father/hero figures “who knew her for the exceptional person she considered herself to be”—Austin loved the West but lived intermittently in New York City for fourteen (largely unhappy) years. Stineman attempts to update Augusta Fink’s biography I-Mary (1983) with an investigation of “the cultural construction ofgender”in Austin’slife and works: an investigation which turns slightly complacent. Stineman scolds Austin for her “essentialist”ideas about men and women and critic Van Wyck Brooks for his “anti-feminist bias.”Dutiful pricks ofconscience like this (hardly cardinal insights) stall what narrative sweep the book has. Stineman vividly evokes artists’ communities like Carmel, where Austin remembered “tea beside driftwood fires, or mussel roast by moonlight” with George Sterling (a.k.a. the California Keats) and “talk—ambrosial, unquotable talk!”She also reevaluates Austin’s unsuccessful marriage and adroidy examines her often stormy friendships with Jack London, Willa Cather, Mabel Dodge...