Raymond Carver – “Why Don’t You Dance?” and other stories

Raymond Carver was one of America’s preeminent short story writers during the 1970s and 1980s — a time that witnessed a great renaissance of the art — and an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes. Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He was married and the father of two before he was 20, and held a number of low-paying jobs: he “picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex,” according to a profile by Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine. Not coincidentally, “of all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class”.

Rejecting the more experimental and postmodern fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a style of stark, precisionist realism in American literature, heading the line of so-called "dirty realists" or "K-mart realists". Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of ordinary working-class people that turn on seemingly insignificant details. Carver writes with unflinching exactness and meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper.

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This is a series of occasional meetups (hosted by the Toronto Philosophy Meetup) to discuss short stories by various authors. We started in 2023 and generally meet every other Sunday evening. Authors we have read include Haruki Murakami, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, James Baldwin, Feng Menglong, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and James Joyce.

This time we will discuss the first 3 short stories from Raymond Carver's celebrated 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, "a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark." We will read other stories from the volume, including the famous title story, at future meetups.

In “Why Don't You Dance?”, a man sells his furnishings on his front lawn, attracting the attention of a young couple. In “Viewfinder”, a man with prosthetic hooks for hands visits a grieving man's home to sell photographs. And in “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”, a man recalls the breakdown of a relationship in a fragmentary, disjointed manner.

Please read the 3 stories in advance (~20 pages in total) and bring your thoughts, reactions, queries, and favourite passages to share with us at the discussion. A pdf of the text will be posted on the main event page.

Note: We'll be joined by many other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at this meeting – https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/308741043/