[Here is how] most of the stories that make up Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love [can] be described: low-rent tragedies involving people who read Popular Mechanics and Field and Stream, people who play bingo, hunt deer, fish, and drink. They work at shopping centers, sell books, have milk routes, or try, drunkenly, to manage a motel. Mostly they live in the Pacific Northwest, but they could just as easily live in Pensacola, Florida, or Manchester, New Hampshire; in any case they drift a lot….

In this remarkable collection as well as in his first, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?…, Raymond Carver has displayed before us a series of delicately mounted specimens taken from a population—a vast population—that most often eludes or falls through the net of our fiction. Carver's people are not grotesque or notably eccentric, nor rascally or...