58. Short Cuts by Raymond Carver

When Robert Altman made his film, Short Cuts, he based his movie on stories of Raymond Carver. The nine stories and one poem (“Lemonade”) that he chose to explore are collected in this slim volume of stories. Altman did take liberties with Carver’s work, and indeed if readers read the collection and watch the film, they will notice that characters sometimes cross over from story to story, and names or occupations may have changed. As a whole, the collection shows ordinary people dealing with innocent things such as watching a neighbor’s apartment, to the huge grief of the Weiss’s child being hit by a car.

For me, the highlights of the collection are two stories: “A Small, Good Thing”, and “So Much Water So Close to Home”. In the first story, Anne Weiss has just ordered a bakery birthday cake for her son Scotty. When Scotty is hit by a car, and later dies of his injuries, she is tormented by the baker when she doesn’t pick up the birthday cake. In the second story, Stuart and Claire try to work through the aftermath of Stuart finding a dead body while on a fishing trip and his staying on the trip and not reporting the body right away. This short story was also made into the new movie, Jindabyne (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382765/). Carver’s stories have also been in the news lately due to the fact that his widow, Tess Gallagher, wants to publish unedited versions of some of Carver’s most famous short stories. For more on this story, see http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6492967.html.