Book Review – No Heroics, Please
Raymond Carver's Uncollected Writings Show the Flaws of a Legend
Upon reading through Raymond Carver’s (1938-1988) posthumously released anthology of uncollected writings, No Heroics, Please (Vintage, ISBN: 0679740074, 1992), one discovers that there’s a certain joy in seeing his stories drag and his poems go nowhere. There’s something encouraging about discovering the pitfalls of a figure previously thought to be invincible.
The Uncollected Fiction
The short stories in No Heroics, Please isn’t just underwhelming: it’s underdeveloped. “Furious Seasons” is a mediocre Faulkner writing-exercise, while “The Aficionados” is a rib on Hemingway’s bullfighting obsession. “Poseidon and Company” is nearly pointless. “Bright Red Apples” is like something an undergraduate would write if he was into ripping off Flannery O’Connor and ending on a melodramatic note.
The best fiction here is “The Hair,” and even that is just an uneventful sign of what was to come. The segment of the novel is all right, but there’s no way he could have sustained that for longer than 20-30 pages, especially being the revision-hound that he was. If these early stories were all someone was to read of Carver’s work, not reading more would be completely understandable.
Reading this collection is similar to watching a home movie of “giant’s first steps” and seeing the behemoth fall down and crack his face on the coffee table. Surely guys like Carver come out of the womb with a furrowed brow and a knack for prose. Or so one would think.
The Uncollected Poetry and Non-Fiction
Carver’s poetry isn’t that great to begin with, falling into the same traps as Charles Bukowski’s poetry, where the poem is just a shortchanged story with line-breaks. The book reviews here aren’t that good either, as his summaries give away too much, provoking an urge to skip the summary and just read his closing thoughts. His opinions on literature – while being well thought-out and written – are essentially underwhelming.
The “Occasions” section is interesting, though with conversational non-fiction, it’s hard to mess up. The essay on “Friendship” was a bit cheesy (he finally let his happiness get to him, scoring yet another victory for mere mortals) and the meditation was all right at best. The section with a bunch of introductions is fluff in an already fluffy collection.
A Collection for Believers
The stories are flat, the poetry is laughable, the non-fiction is bland. So why read this? If for no other reason, read it after digesting everything else Carver has written, just to prove to that he wasn’t a God. At least not at first.
Buy No Heroics, Please on Amazon.com
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