626
PARTISAN REVIEW
I go, "You're a wonderful woman, Holly, I know you've had the
opportunities. "
" But I didn't take them up on it
l "
she goes . "I couldn't go out–
side the marriage. "
" Holly, please," I go. " No more now , honey. Let's not torture
ourselves. What is it we should do?"
These voices admirably convey the loneliness, the attntlOn of
the person by junk language; the brittleness of their lives is exposed
in the ex teriority of the speech line . The magic of Carver's stories is
not
in
the language but
around
it : in the brooding sense of the unsay–
able. The trivial speech rhythms exhaust the inner throat, their dic–
tion injures the inner ear like t.v. -spiel. Unlike mechanical repro–
duction however, spoken language here is high artifice, distilled
from real speech, ferment ed. In "Gazebo," when the couple have
reached a breaking point, the narrator says: "There was this funny
thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything
had." And the title story of the book is drawn from the sentence, "it
ought to make us ashamed when we talk like we know what we ' re
talking about when we talk about love ." Here colloquialism verges
on the incantatory. Otherwise the extrusion of interiority into the
shell of stereotype, the privation of image and metaphor, lays an air
of desolation thickly about the stories. E llipsis is the predominant
mode of Carver's voices, an anguished contraction of the speech–
muscl es. At the end of
Gazebo :
I hear a car start. Then another. They turn on their lights against
the building and, one after the other, they pull away and go out
into the traffic.
" Duane," Holly goes.
In this too she is ri ght.
Like the sentences, the stories end on an edge with their "lives" left
hanging in an air of unce rtainty. A muted miniature apocalypse
breaks silently about these personages.
Carver has the abi lity, rare today in the zero temperature of
voix
blanches,
to give a voice to his characters. The first-person narrator
who tells about half the stories wears a male or female voice with
equal grace. The voice, similar to his (or he r) characters, multiplies
through the "unspoken" text with its colloquial tone and clumsy
di ct ion . The reade r is drawn into the voices implicitly or, as in the
