Book Review – Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver's First Collection of Short-Stories is a Success

May 11, 2009

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? sets the stage for a career of solid, highly-crafted writing based around the life of everyday people and their everyday lives.

If anything, the characters Raymond Carver creates in 1976’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (McGraw-Hill, ISBN: 0070101930) are painfully real, if nothing else. The types of people who say things like, “My life is going to change. I feel it” are usually trying to figure things out, working through abstract ideas about “happiness” and “satisfaction.” These people are likeable – for the most part – and to read about them in stories that are written using the same language they use is a treat.

To see the working women and men of a downtrodden 1970's America (and, truly, any time) be discussed without degradation and be looked at instead of down upon is so rare. To see them not be glorified, either, is even more rare.

Carver’s Limitations and Characters

Stylistically, Carver doesn’t have much variety. Even when looking at the more uplifting, detailed scope of 1983’s collection Cathedral and beyond, he’s always rooted himself in characters who speak with short declarations or lengthier monologues. The people he creates are unable to interact with each other without tension, and they are the ones who drive the narrative.

That said, when Carver is good, he’s good. When he’s not as good, it’s just because the story wasn’t there to begin with. His experimentation is limited to a couple stories in No Heroics, Please (“Furious Seasons” is mediocre Faulkner and “The Aficionados” is funny Hemingway) and the oddly brilliant short story “Errand” about the last day of Chekhov’s life. Only one story in this particular collection leaves “present day” in favor of an earlier time – the underwhelming “Sixty Acres,” set in some sort of Little House on the Prairie-era, it seems – with the rest being standard Carver fare (aside from “Why, Honey?” a story in letter form from a mother to a son).

Though Solid, the Collection Suffers From a Few Snags

The stories that miss the mark aren’t bad, really, just uneventful. “The Father” seems unfinished, and certainly too short. “The Ducks” drags like poorly constructed Chekhov. “Jerry and Molly and Sam” is reminiscent of Charles Bukowski’s more literary attempts at short fiction, but Carver’s reluctance to write a flat-out humor story seems to have muddled things up for him.

The mailman narrator of “What Do You Do In San Francisco?” is annoying, and the contrast between the family and the narrator is too heavy handed. There are a few other stories that just don’t stick to the ribs, though nothing was painful to read. In an act of self-recognition, the near-perfect hand-selection of Carver’s “greatest hits” (the career retrospective Where I’m Calling From) ignores the majority of these lesser stories.

The Wonderfully Crafted Carver

The good stories are plentiful: “The Student’s Wife” and “They’re Not Your Husband” cover marital woes wonderfully, as the reader finds out what people unknowingly will and will not do, respectively, to save their marriage. “Fat” is bizarre, yet fulfilling, in both set-up and pay off. “Collectors” is another odd one, showing what people cling to in the pathetic depths of loneliness.

Perhaps the two finest stories here – “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets” and “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please” – find Carver tiptoeing around Hemingway’s “definition of manliness” territory. The first of these family affairs deals with a son, his father, and, disjointedly, the father’s father. In the second, the reader is left in the midst of a crumbling marriage, right next to the man who had to know if the truth was more important.

The Beginning of a Legend in American Short-Fiction

Though this is his first collection, Carver already has his footing in fiction. It’s almost unfair to say that the stories improve for his next collection (1981’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), as the good stories here are amongst his best work.

This is a strong collection, but the stories worth reading (for the non-diehards) have all been anthologized in Where I’m Calling From. Though he would write both his bleakest and his most optimistic work after Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, the stories found here are just as solid and honest as the very lives they emulate.

The copyright of the article Book Review – Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in American Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Book Review – Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.