Volume 28, Number 8 · May 14, 1981
Low-Rent Tragedies
By Robert Towers
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
Knopf, 159 pp., $9.95
Lifetime
by Scott Sommer
Random House, 208 pp., $9.95
Ellis Island and Other Stories
by Mark Helprin
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 196 pp., $10.95
'Another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies'—thus the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl describes the situation that arises when the daughter, reacting to her drunken and abusive father, stays out of school for weeks and says that no one can make her go. And thus might most of the stories that make up Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love be described: low-rent tragedies involving people who read Popular Mechanics and Field and Stream, people who play bingo, hunt deer, fish, and drink. They work at shopping centers, sell books, have milk routes, or try, drunkenly, to manage a motel. Mostly they live in the Pacific Northwest, but they could just as easily live in Pensacola, Florida, or Manchester, New Hampshire; in any case they drift a lot. 'We lived in Albuquerque then,' says the narrator of the title story. 'But we were all from somewhere else.'
Review, 3073 words
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