English Book Club: Cathedral

The novel: Cathedral

“Cathedral” is the title of a collection of short stories published in 1983. It was the first story written after finishing What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and it is considered as one of the most relevant exemples of the “dirty realism”.
Dirty realism stories are about middle-class characters and the disappointments, heartbreaks, and harsh realities of their ordinary lives. Many of Carver’s short stories, including “Cathedral,” are prime examples of the dirty-realist style.
Carver finishes “Cathedral” with a “zero ending”. A zero ending is an ending that doesn’t neatly tie up the strands of a story. It may not even seem like an ending—in some cases, the writer may seem to have left off in the middle of a thought or idea. Instead of tacking on a florid conclusion that leaves everyone satisfied, Carver often stops his stories abruptly, at the moment when his characters are faced with a stark realization, glimmer of hope, or wall of confusion.
However, controversy arose over the nature of Carver’s writing—and even his lasting literary reputation—in the early 21st century. It was revealed that his long-time editor, Gordon Lish, had drastically changed many of Carver’s early stories. While Lish’s significant involvement in Carver’s writing had long been suspected, the extent of his editing became public knowledge when, in 2007, Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, announced that she was seeking to publish the original versions of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (which appeared as Beginners in the U.K. and also as part of the Library of America’s Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [both 2009]). Lish was shown to have changed characters’ names, cut the length of many stories (over 75 percent of the text in two cases), and altered the endings of some stories. However, most of Carver’s famously terse sentences were his own, as was the hallmark bleak working-class milieu of the short stories.

The author: Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver (May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Oregon — August 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Washington) was an American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life.
He married a year after finishing high school and supported his wife and two children by working in several jobs. He became seriously interested in a writing career after taking a creative-writing course at Chico State College in 1958. His short stories began to appear in magazines while he studied at Humboldt State College (B.A., 1963). Carver’s first success as a writer came in 1967 with the story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” and he began writing full-time after losing his job as a textbook editor in 1970. The highly successful short-story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) established his reputation.
Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 and was repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism in the 1970s, while continuing to turn out short stories. After conquering his drinking problem in the late 1970s, he taught for several years at the University of Texas and at Syracuse University, and in 1983 he won a literary award whose generous annual stipend freed him to again concentrate on his writing full-time.
In his short stories Carver chronicled the everyday lives and problems of the working poor in the Pacific Northwest. His blue-collar characters are crushed by broken marriages, financial problems, and failed careers, but they are often unable to understand or even articulate their own anguish. Carver’s stripped-down, minimalist prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power. He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English-language short story in the late 20th century.
He died of lung cancer at age 50.