In Carver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. She was beautiful he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books.That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125.See what’s new in October: Among this month’s new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric.Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more.Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day.
“I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. Or Mexico.Īnd until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.Īs brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. In 1956, the Carvers relocated to Chester, Calif. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”īorn in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later - and seemingly without irony. Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash.
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