Raymond Carver is a pernicious alchemist. Take [the] setting, for example, from the beginning of the title story of his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love….

Nearly all of the elements of a Carver story are here: people with the most ordinary of local habitations and names, rootless, with busted marriages behind them, who drink cheap gin at kitchen tables and for whom the outside world arrives over kitchen sinks. Base metals, dross indeed, to most writers. How many nowadays would have the gumption to attempt to dazzle, to move, with such clay? Or more to the point, how many could succeed in molding it into some of the finest and most original stories of their generation?

That's why Raymond Carver is an alchemist. And that's why he is pernicious. With his primer-simple language, his terrible lucidity, his universe-in-a-grain-of-sand vision, he is becoming...