I can’t remember the first Raymond Carver story I read. “Cathedral” is a safe bet, but I can’t be sure. I only remember that, in my early twenties, when I began dreaming of a writing life in earnest, there he was. For writers like me (i.e. male millennial with a liberal arts degree) Carver has always been there, the patron saint of realism, the epitome of craft, a master of distilling life into language.
The first time I even heard the name Lucia Berlin, I was in my mid-30s, in an MFA program—the last in a career of writing workshops. My teacher, late writer Stephen Earl Hobbs, handed me a wonky photocopy of “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” the title story in Berlin’s posthumous short story collection. Like Carver’s, her prose was clean and declarative. But in her writing, emotion and sensation and judgment all happened in the open, on the page, without reservation. For as ‘real’ as Carver’s stories had felt, Berlin’s felt messier, dirtier, realer.
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As quivering masses of protoplasm, we all filter reality through the same set of feeble sensory organs, so any attempt to portray being as we understand it bears intrinsic limitations. As an -ism, the style at issue is merely shorthand for confining a story to reality.
That doesn’t mean realism is sacrosanct.
When the question of reality in fiction causes friction in his MFA workshops, writer and educator Lee Clay Johnson likes to say, “art is artifice,” period, end of sentence. The point is purposely blunt: don’t get too hung-up on what’s real. Realism as a style or genre or whatever you want to call it looms large in institutional writing pedagogy (i.e. MFAs) not because of pigeonholing or elitism, but because it affords an inherently, universally accessible and recognizable palette with which to paint. It’s anatomy for artists, scales for musicians, knifework for cooks—rudiments.
Seasoned writers (most of whom are not formal educators) need some kind of durable paradigm within which they can critique writing mechanics. Sharpening skills is, after all, why people participate in formal writing workshops, at least ostensibly.
Like Carver’s, Berlin’s stories portray a certain type of lonely, white, working-class, small-city pathos endemic to the 20th-century’s back-nine. The difference is, her protagonists are women.So that’s why realism remains important to honing craft; it is a mode whose success is almost entirely predicated on empathic connection and keen observation. And, labels aside, since Carver’s fiction is exclusively short-form, set in the real-world, traffics in the subtextual and does it all using surgically clean prose, his work has become de rigueur. And I guess now is as good a time as any to acknowledge the heavy influence Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, had on his prose. Any references I make to “Carver” encompass the body of work published under his name.
Masterful as Carver’s work is, his mien undeniably reflects dated attitudes, norms, and conventions. Enthusiasm for his writing can, unfortunately, wind up propagating a certain type of unbearable literature bro. That, in turn, makes him—and as its exemplar, realism overall—somewhat easier to dismiss out of hand.
To be clear: I am not trying to reduce the importance or beauty of Carver’s work whatsoever; I couldn’t even if I tried. If one wants to learn to write, Carver’s oeuvre is a curriculum unto itself. Simply, my point is this: if the writers who cut their teeth on Carver want to make a strong case for the enduring relevance, utility, and breadth of realism, they should consider looking instead to Lucia Berlin.
The parallels between Berlin and Carver are striking.
Born within two years of one another, both were hetero, goyish, and raised working-class. Before writing landed each a vocation, they both made ends meet by shoveling shit. Both wrote short fiction in the 70s and 80s about life in the 50s and 60s. Both had an affinity for Chekhov’s unsparing interpersonal conflict. Both resided in and wrote about the Pacific coast. Both went on to become writing teachers. Both drank themselves out of happiness and health. Both died prematurely.
Comparing the two writers isn’t novel; they themselves recognized the affinity. “Yes I love Raymond Carver’s work…” Berlin wrote in a letter to her friend, the poet August Kleinzahler. “I wrote like him before I ever read him. He liked my work, too… Recognised one another immediately.”
Like Carver’s, Berlin’s stories portray a certain type of lonely, white, working-class, small-city pathos endemic to the 20th century’s back-nine. The difference is, her protagonists are women. Like his, her characters drink and smoke and fuck and frequently wage quiet war against their own impulses. But whereas Carver uses subtlety and implication to emphasize stories’ negative spaces, Berlin’s characters openly acknowledge emotional damage and struggle and desire. Like his, her prose is clean and straightforward. Yet whereas he traffics in blunt, declarative statements, she is more unreserved, playing with rhythm and fragment and punctuation to mimic the syncopation of thought and speech and memory.
Rather than discuss such a specific subject in the abstract, let me illustrate by comparing a short story written by each author.
Caver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home” stars Claire, a young, suburban housewife and mother. During a recent fishing trip, her alcoholic husband, Stuart and his friends found a young woman’s corpse floating in a river. Rather than cut the trip short, the men waited until their excursion’s end to report the murder. The story begins after Stuart returns home. Claire’s misgivings expose the depth of both her unhappiness and Stuart’s abuse.
Berlin’s “Tiger Bites” is the story of Lou, a pregnant young mother visiting family in South Texas for Christmas. Prior to the story’s beginning, her second husband has abandoned her and her toddler son (by another man). Lou reveals the situation to her cousin, Bella Lynn, who arranges for Lou to cross the border into Mexico for an illegal abortion. Profoundly affected by her experience at the clinic, Lou reevaluates her life and decisions before returning home.
Why compare these two specific stories? Both are narrated in the first-person by a women (a rare turn for Carver). Both protagonists are young mothers to boys. Both stories deal with sexual violence against women. Both works conspicuously feature a thematically weighty river. Both bear strong currents of agency, loneliness, misogyny, motherhood, judgment, alcoholism, and desperation.
Let’s take a look at three aspects of craft that, I would argue, are superior in Berlin’s story: setting, narration, and supporting characters.
SETTING
Carver: “In a few minutes we cross Everson Creek and turn into a picnic area a few feet from the water. The creek flows under a bridge and into a large pond a few hundred yards away. There are a dozen or so men and boys scattered around the banks of the pond under the willows, fishing.”
Berlin: “We came to the bridge and the smell of Mexico. Smoke and chili and beer. Carnations and candles and Kerosene. Oranges and Delicados and urine…Church bells, ranchera music, bebop, jazz, mambos. Christmas carols from the tourist shops. Rattling exhaust pipes, honkings, drunken American soldiers from Fort Bliss. El Paso matrons, serious shoppers, carrying pinatas and jugs of rum.” (Note: ellipses appear as-written)
Though both renderings of place are delivered in first-person narration, the fragmented nature of Berlin’s has a memetic quality of emerging sensory observation—ironic as Carver’s is the story told in an unfolding present-tense. And whereas Carver restricts setting to visual details, Berlin uses sight, sound, and smell. One setting is described, the other is truly observed.
We could, of course, chalk all of this up to character. But I don’t think searching for extenuation is as useful for our purposes as evaluating what’s on the page.
NARRATION
In “So Much Water…” if we didn’t have Carver’s entire body of work featuring many instances of incredibly similar “dirty realism” detachment, it would be fair to read Claire’s flat affect as her voice.
But, simply put, Carver’s protagonist just feels flatter, less real, and I will say, rendered in a somewhat patronizing manner when viewed next to Berlin’s. I also think it is fair to say that Lou has a much more nuanced sense of interiority than Claire—her voice and what she notices and how she reflects upon her world add up to a richer sense of character. Lou has a distinct voice, Claire the absence of one.
An encounter with a predatory doctor:
Carver: “Stuart asks [Claire] to see a doctor and she does, secretly pleased at the doctor’s solicitous attention.”
Berlin: “It was his arrogance and authority that labeled him as doctor. He was dark, liquidly sexy, he walked softly, like a thief.”
A moment of reverie, interrupted:
Carver: “A door opens at one side of the chapel and I look up and for a minute the parking lot reminds me of a meadow. But then the sun flashes on car windows.”
Berlin: “It was a lovely day, matter of fact, crisp and clear, the sky a gaudy Mexican blue. But the silence in the car was impenetrable, heavy with shame, with pain. Only the fear was gone.”
Yes, without context, it’s almost impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but each of the above examples is a good representation of the two writers’ respective styles.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
In both scenes I’m using as examples, the protagonist encounters an older woman reacting to her young son. Keeping the old “show, don’t tell” precept in mind, note the two characters’ relative life on the page.
Carver: “She is a tall, cold woman with white-blonde hair. She gives me the feeling that she is always judging, judging[…] She looks at me steadily from over her glasses. Then she nods and turns to [my son] Dean, saying ‘ How are you, my little man?’ she stoops and puts her arms around him. She looks at me again as I open the door to leave. She has a way of looking at me without saying anything.”
Berlin: “Jesus, our Blessit Redeemer!” It was old Mrs. Veeder […]. She had swooped [my toddler son] Ben up in her arms, dropping her cane, teetering around with him in the dining room. He laughed, thought it was a game, the two of them crashing against side boards and china closets, crystal shattering[…] Mrs. Veeder staggered off with him to her room, where there was another TV, tuned soap operas, and had enough junk on her bed to amuse him for months.”
Once again, a certain flatness in Carver’s work is unquestionably purposeful, so a valid reading of the supporting characters’ tonality in “So Much Water…” is that Claire’s depression and anxiety and dissociation alienates her from others. There’s strong evidence for this on the page.
Still, if we’re using Carver as a stylistic standard-bearer, I don’t think it’s fair to exculpate him from the responsibility of imbuing supporting characters with dimension; as writer David Gates is fond of saying: Every character should believe they are the story’s protagonist.
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In both of the story examples I’ve given, we find beautiful simulacra of existence as we understand it with virtually no bar for the willing suspension of disbelief. The situations, characters, conflicts—we buy it all without question and in doing so, are emotionally effected. That’s pretty amazing. The differing means of accomplishing the feat only proves that there is plenty of room within realism for creativity and imagination and style.
Who knows how things might’ve been if Berlin had been mentored by Gordon Lish or welcomed into Iowa’s embrace.But in reality, what I’ve presented is a false choice: there’s no reason for preferencing one story or writer over the other. Everyone should study them both, especially anyone seeking to improve their writing. We all learn by emulating those we admire and anyone seeking to build a strong foundation would be well served by standing on either set of shoulders. Or both. Or Amy Hempel’s, or Richard Ford’s, or Joy Williams’s. You get the point.
More than anything, writing this was an exercise in frustration. In my own life, reading Berlin’s work for the first time almost felt like learning a secret history of the world Carver portrayed—the one where I’d spent so much time when I was young and in love with fiction and just wanted to be a better writer. I had to wait until I was in my thirties and mature enough to recognize the enormity of the bias I brought to bear on what was supposedly real.
Sure, my complaint might be a little petulant, but the point stands: Carver’s star began rising before he was 30; he enjoyed more of the right attention and access and therefore exposure and resources in his lifetime than Berlin. She’d been dead for over a decade by the time widespread respect was well and truly put on her name, by which point Carver had already been canonized. Who knows how things might’ve been if she’d been mentored by Gordon Lish or welcomed into Iowa’s embrace or found herself the fulcrum of a zeitgeist?
As a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God lit bro, Carver was catnip for my younger self. But demographically speaking, MFAs aren’t my territory—women comprise the majority of creative writing BFAs and MFAs. Looking back, I can only imagine how tiresome it must’ve been for the young women in my early workshops to hear endless Carver evangelism.
So from here on out, let’s make sure that, in rooms where eager writers are beginning to hone their skills in earnest, are getting excited about committing their world to prose, alongside Raymond Carver, Lucia Berlin is who we talk about when we talk about realism.
