What We Talk About When We Talk About Love | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 6 pages of analysis & critique of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 6 pages of analysis & critique of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
This section contains 1,564 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Robert Houston

SOURCE: Houston, Robert. “A Stunning Inarticulateness.” Nation 233, no. 1 (4 July 1981): 23–5.

In the following review, Houston regards “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” as emblematic of Carver's short stories.

Raymond Carver is a pernicious alchemist. Take this setting, for example, from the beginning of the title story of his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: “The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from someplace else.”

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...

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This section contains 1,564 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Robert Houston
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Critical Review by Robert Houston from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.