Country or city?
Warnes: City.
Late work or early rise?
Warnes: Neither (baby in the house).
Newspaper or website?
Warnes: Newspaper.
Writing or reading?
Warnes: Reading.
Toast or cereal?
Warnes: Cereal.

She put a plate in front of him with bacon, a fried egg, and a waffle. She put another plate on the table for herself. It’s ready, she said.
It looks swell, he said. He spread butter and poured syrup over the waffle, but as he started to cut into the waffle he turned the plate into his lap.
I don’t believe it, he said, jumping up from the table.
The girl looked at him, then at the expression on his face, and she began to laugh.
If you could see yourself in the mirror, she said and kept laughing.
He looked down at the syrup that covered the front of his woollen underwear, at the pieces of waffle, bacon, and egg that clung to the syrup. He began to laugh.
I was starved, he said, shaking his head.
You were starved, she said, still laughing.

Let me begin this essay by thanking the editors. Getting their invitation to be the professorial voice for this year’s issue of aspeers was a nice surprise and provided a welcome bright point in a period that has been a bit wearing for UK universities. Plenty of obvious reasons, of course, explain why the request gladdened me so much. It is always gratifying to find scholars and students elsewhere in the world taking an interest in my writing on food, race, and literature. I find it pleasing, too, to see that others are growing interested in this subject—and not (just) because I’m obsessed with food but also because I believe that literary critics in the past have sometimes taken less notice of the material world than the writers whom they have examined and that reflecting on food—and turning ourselves, more generally, into what Michel de Certeau once called “voyagers in the ordinary” (xxxix)—can, accordingly, help to address what remains something of a silence in our discourse. Literary figurations of food and eating, after all, are rarely just incidental. Even when they appear marginal, secondary to a novel’s ‘true’ work of psychological insight, they often turn out to be central. Perhaps it goes without saying that, in the pages that follow, I aim to demonstrate the truth of this observation.

But the invitation also pleased me because it caught me right on the brink of beginning my next book. Embarking on a long work is, for me, a time to be expansive—to get the words onto the page without worrying unduly about the editing that lies ahead. So aspeers’s request for a relatively informal piece—something more like a work in progress than the finished article—again suggested good, if accidental, timing. It will, I hope, allow me to write in the more open and impressionistic way that I find works best at the start of new research. It will, above all, allow me to consider more subjective matters and spend some time here reflecting on the relationship between my own cultural situation and the research issue that now occupies me. And I am keen to get this done. For my next book will be about US figurations of overconsumption, and particularly of overeating, and the days when Europeans could dismiss obesity as a peculiarly American epidemic are, of course, long behind us.¹

Mar 01, 2010  “It All Fell in on Him”: Masculinities in Raymond Carver's Short Stories and American Culture during the 1970s and 1980s Vanessa Hall The Journal of Men’s Studies 2010 17: 2, 173-188. Nov 09, 2010  Carol Sklenicka is the author of Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, which was named of one of the 10 Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review, and Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer. She lives with poet and novelist R.M. Ryan in northern California.

Indeed, I set these words down in a coffee shop that has learnt many of its best lines from Starbucks and that, like Starbucks, seems determined to lure me into buying all manner of foods I shouldn’t: bacon croissants and toasted cheese sandwiches, sweet pretzels and sweeter muffins, coffees larded in infinite combinations of syrups, sugar, and cream. With this observation, however, a troubling question presents itself: Does the international spread of the obesity epidemic owe anything to that other global phenomenon that we long ago learnt to call Americanisation? Is the former, somehow, travelling on the coattails of the latter? For sitting here, just round the corner from Leeds Town Hall, the cliché happens to be true: Statues of Victorian industrialists might loom over our window, Yorkshire accents might remain audible among the crowd, but this coffee shop could be anywhere—anywhere rich enough to support that blend of commerce and cool that marks US culture at home and abroad. The particular ways in which that culture reinvents pleasure, assimilating it into a Puritanical paradigm of temptation and guilt, might affect me very differently from someone living in the United States itself; but they affect me nonetheless.

Or maybe I have just been reading too much Raymond Carver.

Collapsing Americanisation and globalisation into each other, of course, was never the wisest thing to do and has come to seem even less so since the United States entered what Don DeLillo has one character call the time of “our desperation, our dwindling” (35). You could certainly argue that this new kind of coffee shop—the Starbucks template, if you will—only happened to originate in Seattle and actually has less to do with America per se than with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri once conceptualised as a new form of “global capital” that extends so far beyond “national space” as to render such modern categories obsolete (279). Anyone wishing to make that kind of argument, indeed, could easily build up a comparison between Starbucks and other global corporations, from IKEA to Sony, to deliver a vision of a postnational consumerist culture with only the loosest American ties.

And yet, as I say, I have been reading a great deal of Raymond Carver lately; and, before I would go along with any such ‘postnational’ argument, it would, I think, have to reckon with all the similarities that we can find between the coffee houses of 2012 and the diners of Carver’s fiction, and it would have to deal, accordingly, with the specific US tradition that these similarities bring back into focus. It would have to deal with the fact that our coffee houses and Carver’s diners both offer menus of enormous length, delivering the “impossibly large bill of fare” that Andrew P. Haley tells us had become a recognised feature of “American restaurants” at least by 1900 (80). It would have to deal with the fact that both establishments accommodate still more possibilities, the diner cooking eggs and the coffee shop brewing coffee in endless, passionately individuated, variation. It would have to deal with the fact that both, diner and coffee house alike, sample freely from different European traditions, placing eclectic hyphenations at the service of what Sidney Mintz calls “our obsessive notions about individual freedom” (124). And it would have to deal, above all, with what I think is the most striking characteristic that these establishments hold in common: the fact that both require customers to resist, to exercise restraint, and to all but overlook vast sections of the menu—unless, of course, they want to get, or stay, fat.

Carver’s first major collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), repays close attention on this matter. Somehow or other, whenever diners appear in this collection, Carver finds a way of suggesting that their menus are traps: culinary sirens, promising satiety, that tempt customers towards the rocky shores of calorific excess. His eyes are trained on the moral power of the frugal order, of the basic sandwich requested in the face of the fattening smorgasbord. As in Starbucks, where they make something of a secret of their regular coffee, Carver suggests that simple orders manage to defy the menu even as they can command moral approval. In Carver, indeed, the diner can appear a rather theatrical space, one in which some customers get to act out virtue, perform their restraint, even as others fall under the spotlight as they cave in to the menu’s delights.

Fig. 1. 2. Interior View Looking East: White Crystal Diner, 20 Center Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, Monmouth County, NJ.

This dynamic—what we might think of as the Puritan theatrics of the diner—frequently grows apparent in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Nowhere is it more evident, though, than in “Fat” and “They’re Not Your Husband.” These stories, I think, should be required reading for those critics and journalists who from time to time pop up and try to tell us that Carver was a cold and uninvolved observer of ordinary American life. For they suggest that, if anything, the opposite is true. Literature committed to representing reality, after all, rarely grows as absurd as “Fat,” while in “They’re Not Your Husband” Carver strays into melodrama, providing us with a veritable villain in Earl Ober, a salesman “between jobs,” and a bona fide victim in Doreen, his unfortunate wife, who has to “work nights as a waitress at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop at the edge of town” (27). Further proof of Carver’s moral commitment can be derived from the fact that the plotline of “They’re Not Your Husband”—in which Earl, embarrassed by comments other male diners make about his wife’s backside, forces her on the most joyless of diets—resonates so interestingly with Laura Mulvey’s contemporary theories of Hollywood film production. That is to say, the years in which Carver edited and reshaped this story were the same years in which Mulvey, having helped to disrupt the Miss World beauty contest in 1970, went on to theorise that Hollywood, too, manufactured scopophilia: images of erotic female beauty that it furnished for the “visual pleasure” of its tacitly male, straight, audience (15).

And working independently, still languishing in obscurity, Carver in this story grasps the diner counter as a threshold for scopophilia of a more immediate, interpersonal kind. Figure 1 can help us to visualise this. Here, without commenting on the strangers in the photograph (they are just sitting there, after all!), we can perhaps see, with Carver, how the diner counter theatricalises space, ranging a small audience around what is at once a kitchen and a stage: a place where some bodies watch others, to be sure, but also where the former might catch the latter unawares, in moments of accidental exposure, in awkward poses ordained by the exigencies of cooking and other tasks. This, then, is the context for the peculiar embarrassment that Earl feels when his wife fails to provide his two fellow male diners with the scopophilic experience that all three expect from this performative setting:

This is no ‘cold’ observer at work. Here, on the contrary, Carver is at his most withering, empathising with someone who, to some of his contemporary male writers, all too often appeared invisible. He achieves this, allying the narrative with Doreen, not by harnessing her voice or otherwise imagining himself into her female viewpoint but by watching those who watch her. Significant observational details seem to delegate moral judgement to us as readers; at the same time, though, they surely steer us towards one judgement in particular. For it is hard to hear the quiet panic creep into the voice of “the first man” without feeling he is a bit of an idiot. And it is, if anything, harder still not to notice the sheer injustice in the power he and his friend wield, their casual assumption of the right to talk dirty. A whole world of disgust, perhaps self-disgust, crystallises in the “open” collars and “undone” ties of these loathsome customers. This looseness, like the fattening fixings that encircle Earl’s sandwich, speaks volumes about the operation of scopophilia—about who must ‘look after’ their bodies and who can ‘let themselves go’—and about who, in other words, watches whom.

Nowhere, though, are Carver’s sympathies clearer than in the riot of saturated fat—ice cream, chocolate syrup, aerosol cream—that Doreen ladles into the bowl. One of the striking things about this image is the way in which it rejects its own temporal subversion. By this I mean that the image, at least as it is viewed by the three men, subverts time insofar as it seems to compress into a single present both the anticipation of indulgence and its future impact on the body. In this curious image, weight gain no longer follows a temporal sequence—it no longer appears a delayed reaction but seems to occur instantly as the men read the ice cream and Doreen’s rough, oversized legs as if they were cause and effect of each other. To this extent, however, the image, of course, proves misleading. For the fact that the calorific dessert is destined for one of Doreen’s watching customers leaves us with little choice but to see through Earl’s disapproval and recall the terms on which we first meet his wife. It reminds us, in other words, that she is indeed the household’s main provider, working night shift in some godforsaken eatery, and that she is suffering the harsh judgement of the men she serves simply because from time to time, in the course of these exhausting shifts, she succumbs to the fattening, calorific foods that constantly surround her. What the men see as the legacy of greed appears to us, thanks to the wider picture that the story brings into focus, the consequence of a stressful situation that has left Doreen exhausted and in close proximity to bad, unhealthy food.

“They’re Not Your Husband” and “Fat” have much in common; they can, I think, be approached as companion pieces. Several stylistic echoes exist between the two, helping them to deliver a mutual vision of the power of temptation and judgement in the American diner. One such echo arises as, whereas Carver gives many of his characters seemingly random and quite insignificant names, those of the male partners in these stories really resonate: Earl is anything but noble, while Rudy in “Fat” is, well, rude. (His partner, our unnamed narrator, reports him recollecting that: “I knew a [..] couple of fat guys, really fat guys, when I was a kid. They were tubbies, my God. I don’t remember their names. Fat, that’s the only name this one kid had” [16].) But Rudy’s rudeness, like that of other coworkers, does not outrage our narrator so much and strikes her as normal; what vexes her is her own unease, her own disquiet, at their callous insults. She seems to feel she is wrong to notice the unpleasantness of the label ‘fat’ and alone in recognising the humanity of the customer who must wear this epithet. At the same time, though, these emotional negotiations run alongside, and hold a curious relationship to, an absurd streak in the story whereby the “fat” man keeps referring to himself in the first person plural:

“Fat” and “They’re Not Your Husband,” then, follow a similar trajectory. In both, Carver begins by drawing attention to the investment in guilt and temptation in the diner and presents it as a place of bodily judgement. Having established this, he then shows why some of these judgements, and the assumptions behind them, are flawed. Thus, just as the first story skewers the men’s humiliation of Doreen, so the second dwells on the incessant disparagement of the fat man and begins to suggest that there is something compulsive, obsessive, about it. At odds with his own genteel manner, the other characters’ rudeness about him grows so relentless as to seem, eventually, a pleasure all its own. Carver seems to suggest that they find self-validation, self-reinforcement, through their luxuriant horror at his gargantuan, grotesque body. But their disgust, operating in this way, can not only reveal that the personal freedoms of the American diner have a limit and indicate that the choices on the menu are meant to perform a symbolic rather than a practical function. For if, as Maud Ellmann suggests, the “fear of greed has always haunted” American “prosperity” (8), then the fat man in the diner—like figure 2’s 1910 cartoon of William Taft—provides a welcome object of common disgust, someone onto whose corpulent frame others might displace their own propensity for avarice and excess.

Fig. 2. Keppler, “Oh, Hell! Nobody Loves a Fat Man!”

But the image, again, misleads. The fat man, after all, disclaims enjoyment. And, by subtle insinuations, the story invites us, in the first instance, to relate this repudiation of pleasure to the curious possibility that he might be hiding someone beneath his clothes before then, in the second instance, we realise the implausibility of this explanation, recalling that no one has seen anything amiss. Looping back to our original impression that his use of the first person plural is just idiosyncratic, we are left with a sharper impression of the isolation, the solitude, of this insulted man. All the more powerfully we feel the force of his repudiation of pleasure. Rereading his comment “I guess that’s what you’d call it” (14), a paradox crystallises: Here, in this resonant American setting, dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, the customer who looks like he is making the greatest use of such freedoms in fact tells us he is eating out of obligation rather than desire. Overindulgence, his robotic eating of the bread, comes to seem more of a duty than an indulgence. He seems, almost, to be carrying out an inverted hunger strike, martyring himself, surrendering his body to fat, in order to display it to his fellow diners as a fulfilled and cautionary symbol of the dangers of consumerist excess.

This unsettles the terms by which the fat man is judged. Temptation grows unreliable, contingent, here. That is to say, Carver here seems to see that those who judge in these stories remain committed to a belief that greed and indulgence are stable categories. The scales of biblical justice, for them, continue to function. Just as Eve’s moment of temptation sentenced her to a long future of submission and pain, so, it seems, they imagine that the fleeting pleasure of greed leads to a long and obese aftermath. For the fat figures themselves, though, life is not so simple. Greed is, for them, beside the point. There is, instead, a kind of restlessness here, a desire for something else. They overeat, not in greed or hunger, but as if under command.

I would like to draw this essay to a close by suggesting that such moments of frustration come to seem all the more important in the light of Carver’s second collection, Beginners (1980).² Although, in this collection, Carver pays less attention to diners, his interest remains fixed on moments when his characters reach out for something pure, for something outside themselves, yet find they sully or contaminate it as a result. Nostalgia often animates such desire: Characters envy younger lovers who they happen to encounter, envy their own lost youth, and they stare at their hands, again and again, as if accusing them for their failure to satiate themselves on the objects of their desire. An overall impression of tantalisation duly takes hold. Characters in Beginners Cod4 pc mod menu with bots download. , for one reason or another, try to touch something out of reach—something purer than themselves.

Tantalisation, in the long story “Dummy,” takes food as its focus. Carver, here, tells the story that lies beneath another insulting nickname, his first-person narrator offering an account of the mute Dummy and his plans to fill a lake on his property with black bass. It quickly becomes apparent that the story is also about the narrator’s father, and the narrator provides two pieces of unflattering information, telling us that his father “didn’t approve of the kidding” yet still calls Dummy Dummy (135) and that the father assumes he will have free access to the fish in the pond (“[o]ur own private pond!” is how he describes it to his son [138]). Far from another unattractive feature, however, the father’s overweight body, when first described in the story, seems almost positive, and the prospect of fishing for the bass acquires for him a bounteous, almost Edenic, aspect. The “fish had multiplied like crazy,” he reports to his son; “it would be like dropping your line into a hatchery pond” (140). Indeed, in a story that emphasises the father’s heft and that is littered with references to eating, and snacking in particular, the obsessive focus on the future meal of caught bass comes to seem striking. The possibility of reaching into the lake and catching such a pure and untouched food seems the greatest of inspirations to them. Carver, in turn, emphasises the ways in which the natural world around the lake flinches and recedes as the men enter it and the contrast with the tame, inquisitive fish:

This, I would suggest, is an Edenic, rather than a paradisiacal, image. For these unthreatened fish, it transpires, are harbingers of imminent collapse. Their behaviour suggests a devilish agent at work or at the very least a perversion of a natural order of things in which animals ought to flinch and fish ought to struggle to elude the angler’s rod. Their friendliness might at first seem charming, but it quickly grows unsettling, creating a sense of gathering disaster that grows still further as the narrator and his father speculate that the fish are so tame because “Dummy came down there afternoons and fed them, because, instead of shying away from us as fish should do, these turned in even closer to the bank” (144). With this speculation, the denouement of the story seems guaranteed. Dummy’s power over the fish causes psychosis; it amounts to a demonic identification with them and suggests that he shares that lack of understanding of the human that prevents them from anticipating human aggression. In turn, it comes as no surprise that he should end the story in violence, beating his errant wife “‘to death in the truck with a hammer’” before jumping into the bass-stocked lake (149). The father and son return, at the end of the story, to what has become a crime scene: “In a minute or two I saw an arm emerge out of the water; the hooks had evidently struck him on the side, or the back [..]. It’s not him, I thought for an instant” (150). But Carver makes sure, here, to render the dredging of Dummy’s corpse a common disaster, a second Fall. “I’m not sure what [Father] believes,” the narrator tells us, “I only know he was frightened at the sight, as I was. But it seemed to me life became more difficult for him after that” (150). “Dummy” ends, then, with a kind of disillusionment that is also a restoration of reality. The miraculous prospect that the father and son have witnessed, of a perfect culinary purity that lay within their reach, has been abolished by violence. And while it destroys Dummy himself and spells ruin for the narrator’s father, the experience also heralds the demise of a kind of bad magic and the reinstatement of the kind of ordinary American experience of food and nutritional desire that Carver registers elsewhere. Trauma returns us to a social world in which hunger remains, somehow, necessarily omnipresent, a constant reaching for a horizon of perfection that eludes it.

The ‘dropped’ meal that formed the opening quotation of this essay resists easy interpretation. Whereas some Carver stories considered in this essay are rather moral, even conventional, this scene occurs in the altogether more cryptic “Distance,” a tale that operates by placing disconnected elements together. (The accident occurs in a story about a young man and his pregnant wife that our older protagonist tells to his new lover, and we are left unsure whether it is his personal recollection.) The couple’s laughing, echoing response to the falling plate as well as their unstated feelings about the baby make the incident appear all the more baffling. As an incident, indeed, it might well appear insignificant, lacking in repercussions. But the fact is that Carver put it, and kept it, there. Both the image and the couple’s odd and stilted response to it must, then, have pleased or intrigued him in some way. And the foregoing discussion has perhaps raised some possibilities as to why. The orgy of chocolate and synthetic cream that Doreen prepares for some unspecific customer might make us appreciate that we have here a comparatively wholesome, comparatively appetising, meal. The uncanny feeling, prompted by their laughter, that the meal is meant more for the eyes than the mouth might make us think about the difficulty that the idea of enjoyment seems to cause the titular character in “Fat.” And this, in turn, might make us think about how, in “Dummy,” food that we can touch heralds violent disaster. Here, in the incident of the dropped plate, an image of food as a tantalising substance is not just restored. It is literalised, and the laughter that it prompts surely contains a measure of relief. For now, after the frighteningly unafraid fish of “Dummy,” the eternal pursuit of the new and untouchable appears reinstated. A reaching for purity akin to the historic reaching for the frontier appears restored. Albeit at a banal level, this elusive, flipping meal might indeed seem like the emerald city beyond the rainbow or like that “fresh, green breast of the new world” which F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailors seem sentenced to defile (171). It, too, forever out of reach, might seem the object of an exquisite American dissatisfaction, feeding as it does a hunger beyond food.

Works Cited

• 2. Interior View Looking East: White Crystal Diner, 20 Center Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, Monmouth County, NJ. N.d. “2. Interior View Looking East: White Crystal Diner, 20 Center Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, Monmouth County, NJ.” Library of Congress. Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2012.
• Belasco, Warren James. Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Print.
• Carver, Raymond. Beginners. Ed. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. London: Cape, 2009. Print.
• ---. “Distance.” Carver, Beginners 167-76.
• ---. “Dummy.” Carver, Beginners 134-50.
• ---. “Fat.” Carver, Stories 13-16.
• ---. The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985. Print.
• ---. “They’re Not Your Husband.” Carver, Stories 27-32.
• ---. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?The Stories of Raymond Carver. New York: McGraw, 1976. Print.
• Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.
• DeLillo, Don. Point Omega. London: Picador, 2010. Print.
• Ellmann, Maud. The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment. London: Virago, 1993. Print.
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.
• Haley, Andrew P. Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. Print.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.
• Keppler, Udo J. “Oh, Hell! Nobody Loves a Fat Man!” 1910. Puck 18 May 1910: n. pag. “‘Oh, Hell! Nobody Loves a Fat Man!’” Library of Congress. Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2012.
• Mintz, Sidney W. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Print.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. 14-26. Print.
• Stull, William L., and Maureen P. Carroll. Preface. Carver, Beginners vii-viii.

Notes

1 On the global reach of the obesity epidemic, cf. Belasco 88-94.

2 Beginners, as William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll tell us, was “the original version of seventeen short stories [..] published, in editorially altered form, as What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” in 1981. In response to those editorial cuts and abridgement, Stull and Carroll add, Carver “promised his partner Tess Gallagher that one day he would republish his stories at full length” (vii). Under these circumstances it seems likely that referring to the text of Beginners, rather than that of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, as Carver’s ‘second’ collection should now become standard practice.

Cartoon invitation for a party celebrating the publication, by.Unlike his later collections, the stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Were written during a period Carver termed his 'first life' or 'Bad Raymond days', prior to his near-death from alcoholism and subsequent sobriety. The earliest compositions date from around 1960, the time of his study under at in English 20A: Creative Writing.In the decade and a half following, Carver struggled to make space for bursts of creativity between teaching jobs and raising his two young children, and later, near-constant drinking. The compositions of Will You Please. Can be grouped roughly into the following periods:. 1960–1961 – 'The Father'. 1960–1963 – 'The Ducks', 'What Do You Do in San Francisco?'

. 1964 – 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' , 'The Student's Wife', 'Sixty Acres'.

1967 – 'How About This?' , 'Signals', 'Jerry and Molly and Sam'. 1970 – 'Neighbors', 'Fat', 'Night School', 'The Idea', 'Why, Honey?' , 'Nobody Said Anything', 'Are You a Doctor?' . 1971 – 'What Is It?' ('Are These Actual Miles?'

), 'What's In Alaska?' , 'Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes', 'They're Not Your Husband', 'Put Yourself in My Shoes'. 1974 – 'Collectors'Although several of the stories had appeared previously in prominent publications (the Foley Collection had published the story 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' In 1967 and Esquire had accepted 'Neighbors' in 1971), as the first author to be collected in the new imprint for fiction, this marked the first major commercial success of Carver's career. The title for the collection was originally proposed by Frederic W.

Hills, editor at McGraw-Hill, as Put Yourself in My Shoes, and, Carver's editor, agreed. However, after polling friends, Carver made a stand for the eventual title, under which Lish selected 22 of the more than 30 Carver had published to that date.

Critical reception Following the success of experimental literary works by short story writers such as and in the early 1970s, Will You Please. Was noted for its flat, understated incision in contemporary reviews. Included in its first issue of 1976 a notice of the new collection, calling it 'Downbeat but perceptive writing about the inarticulate worlds of Americans.'

Later critical analysis orientated the collection in relation to the later editing conflicts with Gordon Lish in (1981), and the 'expansiveness' of (1983). Bethea's analysis of the collection focuses on the unreliability of the narrators in Will You Please., finding humour and fraught realism in their dramas.

The collection was chosen as one of five finalists for the 1977. Plot summaries “Fat” A waitress recounts a story to her friend, about 'the fattest person I have ever seen,' who comes into the diner where she works and orders a procession of dishes in a polite and self-deprecatory manner. The waitress notices his strange manner of speaking, commenting positively on every aspect of the massive meal. She describes the physical struggle of the fat man, his 'puffing' and overheating.

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After recounting the events at the dinner, the waitress tells her friend how she tried to explain to her partner, Rudy, that 'he is fat. But that is not the whole story'. When they had sex that night, the waitress felt that she was 'terrifically fat', and Rudy was 'hardly there at all'.

The story ends on a note of anticipation, with the waitress thinking to herself: 'It is August./ My life is going to change. “Neighbors” A 'happy couple' who feel life has passed by are asked to house-sit for their neighbors while they are away. As he is in the house across the hall, the husband (Bill) begins to enjoy the voyeuristic experience of exploring his neighbors' things, sampling the food in the fridge, and even trying on their clothes. After the wife (Arlene) spends an absent-minded hour in her neighbors' home, she returns to tell Bill that she has found some pictures he should see.

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'Maybe they won’t come back', she says, as they cross the hall together. Before they can enter the apartment, however, Arlene realises that she has left the key inside their flat, and the door handle will now not turn: locked.“The Idea” After supper, a couple watch through the window as their neighbor walks round the side of his house to spy on his own wife as she undresses. They seem puzzled at the incident, that has been happening 'one out of every two to three nights' for the last three months. The man showers, as the woman prepares food for the next day, telling her partner that would call the cops on anyone who looked in at her while she was undressing. As she scrapes waste food into the garbage, she sees a stream of ants coming from underneath the sink, which she sprays with bug killer. When she goes to bed, the man is asleep already, and she imagines the ants again.

She gets up, turns all the lights on, sprays all over the house, and looks out the window, aghast, saying '.things I can't repeat.' “They’re Not Your Husband” Earl, a salesman between jobs, stops by one night at the 24-hour coffee shop where his wife, Doreen, works as a waitress. She is surprised to see him, but he reassures her and orders a coffee and sandwich.

While he drinks his coffee, Earl overhears two men in business suits making crass comments about his wife. As she bends over to scoop ice cream, her skirt rides up and shows her thighs and girdle.

Earl leaves and doesn't turn round when Doreen calls his name.The next day, Earl suggests Doreen think about going on a diet. Surprised, she agrees, and they research different diets and exercise. 'Just quit eating.

For a few days, anyway', he tells her. She agrees to try. As she loses weight, people at work comment that Doreen is looking pale. Earl insists that she ignore them, however, saying 'You don't have to live with them.' One night after drinks, Earl goes back to the coffee shop and orders ice cream. As Doreen bends down, he asks the man next to him what he thinks, to the latter's shock.

Another waitress notices Earl staring and asks Doreen who this is. 'He's a salesman. He's my husband', she says.

“Are You a Doctor?” A man (Arnold), who is sitting alone in his house while his wife is away, gets a call from a woman who appears to have the wrong number. Upon checking the number, she hesitates, and asks the man's name. He tells her to throw the number away. However, she tells him she thinks they should meet and calls back later to repeat the suggestion. The next afternoon, the man receives a call from the same woman, asking him to come over to see her sick daughter. Arnold takes a cab over, climbs the stairs to the address, and finds a young girl at the door, who lets him in. After some time, the woman returns home with groceries and asks Arnold if he is a doctor; he replies, he isn't.

She makes him tea as he explains his confusion at the whole situation, after which he awkwardly kisses her, excuses himself, and leaves. When he arrives home, the phone rings and he hears his wife's voice, telling him 'You don't sound like yourself.'

“The Father” A family stands around a baby in a basket, commenting on the child's expressions and doting on him. They talk about each of the baby's facial features in turn, trying to say who the baby looks like. 'He doesn't look like anybody', a child says. Another child exclaims that the baby looks like Daddy, to which they ask 'Who does Daddy look like?' And decide that he also looks like nobody. As the father turns round in the chair, his face is white and expressionless.“Nobody Said Anything” A boy claims he is sick, to stay home from school one day after hearing his parents arguing. The father storms out, and the mother puts on her 'outfit' and goes to work, leaving the boy reading.

He explores his parents' bedroom, and then walks out towards Birch Creek to fish. On the way a woman in a red car pulls over and offers him a ride. He doesn't say much, and when he gets out, fantasizes about her. At Birch Creek he catches a small fish, and moves down the river, until he sees a young boy on a bike, looking at a huge fish in the water. They try to work together to catch it, but the young boy swipes at it with a club, and the fish escapes. Further downstream, they find the fish, and the young boy chases it into the boy's grasp.

They decide to cut the fish in two to have half each, but then argue about who gets which half. The young boy gets the tail.

When the boy arrives home he shows his parents, but his mother is horrified, and his father tells him to put it in the garbage. The boy holds the half-fish under the porch light.“Sixty Acres” A Native American accosts two young kids shooting ducks on his land. He lets them go and decides to lease some of his land.“What’s in Alaska?” Jack returns from work one day with a new pair of casual shoes, that he purchased on the way home. He shows his partner (Mary), and takes a bath, as she tells him they have been invited over to the home of their friends (Carl and Helen) that evening, to try out their new 'water pipe'. Mary brings Jack a beer and tells him that she's had an interview for a job in Fairbanks, Alaska.

They drive to the market and buy snacks, drive home again, and walk a block, to Helen and Carl's. Together they try out the pipe, Carl laughing about the fun they had 'breaking it in' the night before. Chips, dip and cream soda are brought out, while they talk about Jack and Mary's possible move to Alaska. Not knowing anything about the place, they imagine growing giant cabbages or pumpkins. Helen thinks she remembers an 'ice man' discovered there. Hearing a scratch at the door, she lets the cat in.

The cat catches a mouse and eats it under the coffee table. 'Look at her eyes', Mary says. 'She high, all right.' When they are all full, Mary and Jack say goodbye. Mary tells Jack as they are walking home that she needs to be 'talked to, diverted tonight'. Jack has a beer, and Mary takes a pill and goes to sleep, leaving Jack awake.

In the dark hall he sees a pair of small eyes, and picks up one of his shoes to throw. Sitting up in bed, he waits for the animal to move again, or make 'the slightest noise.' “Night School” A man is out of work and living with his parents. He meets two women in a bar and offers them a ride in his parents' car in exchange for beer.

After walking to his parents apartment, the man leaves the women outside and decides to stay in the apartment for the night.“Collectors” A vacuum salesman demonstrator shows up at the house of an unemployed man and pointlessly goes through his sales patter.“What Do You Do in San Francisco?” The postman Henry Robertson relates a story of a couple and their three children who move to his rural, working class town. He chronicles how the family are different from the work ethic-driven town members because of their arty lifestyle and the breakdown in the couple's relationship mirrors that of his own failed marriage over 20 years before. He relates how a letter ended his own and the Marston's marriage. In the story, Henry shows his distrust of and bias against Mrs. Marston even though he only sees snippets of their relationship. He blames the lack of work ethic and Mrs Marston's reluctance for her husband to get any work as responsible for what happened. His bias may be in part due to the way his wife told him it was over in a letter sent to him while he was serving overseas.

Free serials cracks and keygens. 'It was work, day and night, work that gave me oblivion when I was in your shoes and there was a war on where I was.' He also sees work as a way to forget his troubles and to help forget his wife and children.“The Student’s Wife” A night of insomnia.“Put Yourself in my Shoes” Coming back from an office party, a couple are interrogated and insulted in a strange meeting with their landlord and his wife.“Jerry and Molly and Sam” A man is driven crazy by the family dog and decides to get rid of it by dumping it on the edge of town. He soon changes his mind.“The Ducks” At work the foreman suddenly dies, so everyone is sent home.

At home one man fails to use the opportunity to have sex with his wife.“How About This?” A couple comes to look at the woman's father’s deserted place in the country. Maybe they will move there.“Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes” A man quits smoking. He calls round to the house of his son's friend, where a dispute is in progress over a missing bike. The man and the accused boy’s father have a fight.“Are These Actual Miles?” An unemployed man’s wife goes out to sell their car and doesn’t return until dawn.“Signals” A couple in a flashy restaurant seems to be trying to find out if they still have a future together.

“I don’t mind admitting I’m just a lowbrow.”“Will You Please be Quiet, Please?” The story of Ralph and Marian, two students who marry and become teachers. Ralph becomes obsessed with the idea that Marian was unfaithful to him once in the past. Eventually, Marian admits to the infidelity, and begs him to forgive her. Ralph gets drunk and feels his whole life changing once he finds out the truth. After storming out of the house and going to skid row, he loses money at a poker game and gets mugged.

Upon returning home early the next morning, he finds evidence that Marian has been wracked with guilt and has been waiting for him to return. He wonders how to proceed if he decides to leave her and locks himself in the bathroom, rebuffing a clearly repentant Marian's begging and pleas for him to let her in so that she can talk to him. Eventually he leaves the bathroom and returns to their bedroom. Marian joins him, and after a while, he turns to her and marvels at the changes within him, implying that he now understands her, himself, and marriage better, and he will give her a second chance and reconcile with her.References. Wood, Gaby (27 September 2009). Retrieved 11 September 2012.

Sklenicka, Carol (2010). Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life.

New York, London: Scribner. P. 65. Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life.

Pp. 272–3. Sklenicka, Carol.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. P. 272. Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. P. 281. Sklenicka, Carol.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. P. 281. Publishers Weekly. Missing or empty title=.

Bethea, Arthur F. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge.

Pp. 7–40. Carver, Raymond (2003). Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? London: Vintage. P. 1.

WYPBQP? P. 3. WYPBQP? P. 3. WYPBQP?

Pp. 4–5. WYPBQP? P. 5. WYPBQP? P. 10. WYPBQP? P. 12.

WYPBQP? P. 15. WYPBQP? P. 18. WYPBQP? P. 20. WYPBQP?

P. 22. WYPBQP? P. 30. WYPBQP? P. 32. WYPBQP?

P. 32. WYPBQP? P. 58.

WYPBQP? P. 66. WYPBQP? P. 68. WYPBQP? P. 69. Prescott, L., ed.

A World of Difference: An Anthology of Short Stories.External links.