The epic biography that Carver deserves.
A rich portrait of a master of the American short story.
The life of Raymond Carver (1938–1988) hews closely to a heroic arc: a hardscrabble childhood, a noble struggle for success, a fall from grace and ultimate redemption. But Sklenicka wisely avoids hagiography, sticking to the facts while astutely connecting real-life details to Carver’s stories and poems. Born in Oregon, Carver began his writing career in earnest in the early 1960s at Chico State University under the tutelage of novelist John Gardner, earning publications in small literary magazines. He traveled often during his early years with his first wife, Maryann, and two children, as he scrounged for whatever academic appointments might enable him to write his ironic, pointed stories about working-class lives. By the early ’70s those stories caught the attention of Esquire fiction editor Gordon Lish, but Carver’s finances were in a shambles—he would declare bankruptcy twice in his lifetime—and his alcoholism had deepened. Sklenicka captures many heartbreaking moments from that period—never more harrowing than when he smashed a wine bottle against Maryann’s head, nearly killing her. Carver stopped drinking in 1977, and in his final years he wrote many of the stories that his towering reputation is now built on. The “Good Ray” that replaced the “Bad Ray” of the alcoholic years was a gentle man who too often acceded to the demands of people like Lish, who invented much of Carver’s “minimalist” reputation by aggressively editing and rewriting his stories. In his final years, though, he earned enough clout and confidence to be nobody’s pushover. Sklenicka spoke with nearly everyone in Carver’s orbit, making the book a kind of history of American fiction in the ’70s and ’80s, capturing the crucial writers (Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Cheever) and sea changes in the publishing industry that made Carver such a powerful influence on writers today.
The epic biography that Carver deserves.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6245-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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