The lives Carver depicts [in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love] are narrow, starved of context. One knows virtually nothing about these people: where they're from, what they look like, what they do for a living. They inhabit a featureless landscape. The only way for them to validate themselves is through the performance of some act—any act—that gives them the illusion of free will. In "A Serious Talk," a man visits his estranged wife and sits mutely at the kitchen table drinking vodka from a cup. "There were things he wanted to say, grieving things, consoling things, things like that"—but instead he cuts the telephone cord while his wife is on the phone. In "Tell the Women We're Going," two young married men get drunk and try to seduce a pair of girls, but end up stoning them to death. There is...