I'm not much into so-and-so is "better than X" in judging great writers, beyond the level of "Faulkner is better than Robert Ludlum." But:
I might be the only person frequenting this board who actually knew Raymond Carver, in the sense of taking a class from him and going out and drinking beer with him a few times. He was a charming and funny guy. He was clearly a dedicated crafter of fiction. He also pushed his urge to "minimalize" too far, IMO, in a substantial number of his stories. He was always trying to find out how little he could do, and still get away with, rather than trying to discover how much he could do. As a result, we have, what, five or six slim collections of stories, the best of them wonderful, the lesser of them skeletal and unsatisfying. He never attempted a novel, as far as I know. I wind up now having the feeling that he wanted badly to be the 20th Century's Maupassant or Chekhov, without having to be as prolific as they were. Having met him, taken a class from him (he was a terrible, virtually useless instructor, by the way), drunk beer with him (he was terrific at that), I'm now sad both that he died too soon, and that he didn't try harder to take his extraordinary ability to a higher level.
caw
Interesting take.
I've never seen Carver as a minimalist in the way that, say, Lydia Davis is a minimalist. I don't think the fact that he never wrote a novel should become fodder for criticism. Clearly, he was interested in the average, in the everyday, those mundane atrocities and all that. Yet I think if you read
Where I'm Calling From, you'll find stories there ("Nobody Said Anything," "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Are These Actual Miles?," "So Much Water So Close to Home," "Chef's House," "Cathedral," etc.) that are immense in what they suggest about the human condition.
And I think that's the thing, and it's why I bristle when people refer to Carver as a minimalist (or, at worst, scoff at his achievements, which is obviously NOT what you're doing in your post): those stories contained multitudes because they were painfully, terrifically, exactingly
right. What he left out was as important as what he put in. There's a whole gestural universe in Carver; you can read one of his stories and be amazed at the world he created under the surface of his characters' actions.
I do not think that Robert Altman got it right. When I first saw
Short Cuts, I was underwhelmed. And I think this is an important criticism. When we talk about Carver, we are talking about form. We're not talking about the man's sordid life, we're not talking about his works compared to the great novels of the 20th century; no, we're talking about the short story. And I think he was brilliant at crafting stories, some large and some small, and his mark on what is being written now, forty years later, is as indelible as any other American writer who ever lived.
