What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

The title story sets two couples drinking gin in a kitchen, arguing about what love actually means by way of an old couple recovering from a near-fatal car crash, and never arrives at a definition, the glasses just keep getting refilled as the light goes out the window. That refusal to resolve is the collection's method: Mel, Terri, Nick, and Laura talk past each other in short, flat sentences that report action without commenting on it, so that a reader has to supply everything the story withholds.

Editor Gordon Lish's cuts, sometimes half a story, are the reason this collection reads the way it does: "The Bath," about a boy struck by a car on his birthday, ends here on a ringing phone and a mother's dread, stripped of the reconciliation Carver had actually written into his own draft. "So Much Water So Close to Home" compresses a wife's horror at her husband's fishing trip, he and his friends find a dead woman in the river and keep fishing rather than report it right away, into clipped, almost toneless paragraphs that let the horror sit entirely in what isn't said.

"Popular Mechanics" runs the same minimalism to its hardest edge: a couple splitting up pull a baby between them in the kitchen, and the story ends on the tug itself, refusing to describe what has actually happened to the child. Carver's people are drinkers, the newly divorced, the recently fired, catastrophe always just offstage, and Lish's cuts keep the reader from ever being told how to feel about any of it.

Carver's original, uncut manuscript for this collection, later published as Beginners, runs roughly half again as long and gives its characters explanations, backstory, and softer landings that Lish removed wholesale. The published book is genuinely a collaboration built on that subtraction: Carver's plain sentences are his own, but the silence around them, the sense that a whole interior life has been amputated from the page, is largely Lish's contribution, and Carver spent years afterward uneasy about how much of the credit belonged to someone else's editing.

Alcohol runs under nearly every story here as the actual engine of the action, not background color: Mel's gin philosophizing, the unraveling marriages, the sudden violence that surfaces once characters have had enough to stop performing politeness. Carver, sober by the time the book appeared, wrote these people from the inside of an addiction he had only recently left, which is part of why the prose refuses to moralize about any of it.