SOURCE: Carlin, Warren. “Just Talking: Raymond Carver's Symposium.” Cross Currents 38, no. 1 (spring 1988): 87–92.

In the following essay, Carlin considers “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” to be a theological exploration of love and finds parallels between Carver's story and Plato's Symposium.

John Updike, in the course of a visit to Paris in the summer of 1986, was interviewed in the popular literary review, Le magazine litteraire.¹ He comments on the stylistic and mechanical excellence of many young writers in America. He then goes on to mention his one serious complaint: Their stories, he says, are too localized, too provincial, and as a result the themes of those stories are too limited. “Young talented writers,” he says, are closed up in the world they describe. Where,” he asks, “is Plato in all of that?”

The question is challenging. Where is Plato in all of this? Where are the...