This life is not easy, any way you cut it.вЂќ That sentiment applies to the lot of us-adulthood entails the management of dream-death and the enduring of letdown-but for CarverвЂ™s people thereвЂ™s no ready path of escape, no imaginable avenue of betterment. In one of his most morally squalid stories, вЂњVitamins,вЂќ the narratorвЂ™s wife tells him: вЂњThis is hard, brother. Everything is hard in CarverвЂ™s world, as everything was in CarverвЂ™s first life, before sobriety saved him. Ordinary objects turn sinister, become omens of ruin: a birthday cake, a refrigerator, an ashtray, an automobile. All have downgraded their ambitions to match their means and the clobbering strictures of reality. His people marry, parent badly, work, drink, smoke, cheat many are let go from jobs they are too good for and furious at a fate so scornful of their needs. And it was bad luck for me that it did.вЂќ In Carver, as Irving Howe once put it, вЂњordinary life is the enemy of ordinary peopleвЂќ-people who dwell within вЂњthe waste and destructiveness that prevail beneath the affluence of American life.вЂќ ThatвЂ™s a devastating appraisal: When you have for an enemy your very life, how are you supposed to succeed if it means defeating yourself?Д¬arverвЂ™s stories certainly sanction this glum reading some try to cut off the possibility of any other. Even when wishes stumble into realization, they are the wrong wishes: вЂњThatвЂ™s one wish of mine that came true. They know not to count on wishes: вЂњanother wish that wouldnвЂ™t amount to anything,вЂќ as the narrator of вЂњFeathersвЂќ has it. Dreams, remarks one character, are what you wake up from.

Abandoned by the American Dream, left nearly destitute by its fallacy, the men and women in his world, in the early stories especially, live meticulously disappointed lives, far from the glow of God. ItвЂ™s been a little over thirty years since the death of Raymond Carver-cancer killed him in 1988 one winces to think he was only fifty-and still he is thought of mostly as the high priest of working-class malaise, chronicler of blue-collar doldrums.

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