I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise . . .
This book has an incredibly troubled history. Raymond Carver turned in his manuscript for this book to his editor Gordon Lish and had no idea that anything was going to be any different than with his previous books. But it was. Lish absolutely took Carver’s manuscript apart to the degree that Carver begged Lish not to publish the list in its final form, but Carver had signed away the rights and Lish had a vision. The book was published and Carver was acclaimed as a new figure of the minimalist movement. One can only imagine how this must have rankled Carver; he and Lish never worked together again and Carver began to go in an ever more expansive direction, repudiating the minimalism he’d actually pioneered in Will You Please Be Quiet Please. Carver’s original manuscript would originally be published, but more on that in a later review.
Anyway, this is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Lish doesn’t just edit Carver’s prose down; there are passages here where there’s nothing of Carver’s words – Lish essentially just paraphrases long sections. And the cuts are not nominal. The final book is half as long as the original manuscript, almost exactly. Some of the stories are absolutely brutalized; there’s a story that’s nearly eighteen pages in Carver’s manuscript that Lish edits down to less than four pages and he changes the title as well to reference a line that he added, a line not in Carver’s original. This is, interestingly enough, both the most demolished story and the least successful in the collection. The rest of the time, this collection works and it works brilliantly. Somehow Lish was able to see through Carver’s prose to spot something diamond hard inside them and this is what he gives us. It’s an odd collaboration, but it works the best when it changes everything from the tone of a story to its arc. The Bath is a great example; Lish boils down the story of a boy hit by a car on his birthday and chooses to end the story on a Hitchcockian twist moment but this necessitates cutting the last ten pages or so from Carver’s story. Carver had a lot more ready to go after that twist. Tell the Women We’re Going is another good one. It revolves around a painfully young man, barely over twenty, who’s already married with a child who is deeply unhappy and adrift. The story ends with a painful gut punch and it’s up for debate whether the more detailed and excruciating ending from Carver is better or worse or just as good as Lish’s abbreviated sucker punch.
But to approach this book outside of Carver’s original manuscript is to approach something like genius. This is a masterful collection of short stories. They revolve around a cast of characters not unlike the ones in Carver’s debut: normal men & women facing deep crises under the surface. The stories here are darker, meaner, less forgiving and, lest we forget, the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet Please were already dark, mean and unforgiving. It’s a weird collaboration that created this book, but I’m glad it did. Lish takes Carver’s already grim stories and tightens them like a noose around the characters and around the readers. The book is a fast read and a gripping one. If you know the story, it’s a fascinating piece of literary history; if you don’t, it’s still a tense, brutal, haunting collection of stories. It’s a collaboration in everything but name and a decidedly strange one, but, in the best twist of all, it’s also a masterpiece. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a fascinating story is behind this book of short stories, but even without the story of the book itself, this book is an American masterpiece of dread, tension, cruelty and brutality. 4 stars.