Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (review)

Since Raymond Carver's early death in 1988, authors and editors of biographical works such as Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver (1993), Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography (1995), Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years With Ray (2000), and What It Used To Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006) have memorialized the life and work of one of the late-twentieth-century's most influential writers of short fiction. While each of these projects will continue to provide varying degrees of insight into the author's life and work, Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life is certain to become the definitive literary biography for years to come.

Readers of Western American Literature will appreciate Sklenicka's proclivity to interpret Carver's prose and poetry within the socio-economic and geographical framework of the American West. She opens the biography, for example, by tracing the migration of Carver's parents and extended family from Arkansas to northeastern Washington during the Great Depression. Readers learn how Carver's ancestors worked in northwest lumber mills, federally irrigated orchards, and on the Grand Coulee Dam—all places that Carver mentions in the essay "My Father's Life" (1984). In years following the Great Depression, Carver's immediate family and relatives settled down in Yakima, Washington, near the Columbia River, and on several occasions Sklenicka takes time to trace how the "salmon and the dams, the forests and the sawmills, the orchards and the fragile settlements of the Columbia Basin" (9) worked their way into Carver's early poems and stories such as "Sixty Acres" (1969), "Nobody Said Anything" (1973), and "So Much Water So Close to Home" (1975).

In time, the biography moves beyond the Pacific Northwest and follows Raymond Carver throughout towns and cities in northern California, the Midwest, the Southeast, the East Coast, and finally back to Washington, where he spent the final years of his life in Port Angeles. Along the way, Sklenicka intersperses interpretations of stories and poems that illustrate how Carver often absorbed into his work the socio-economic moods and landscapes of western towns where he lived. The ominous story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" (1966) is framed within the socio-economic history of timber strikes and the sex trade in Eureka, California, while the regenerative collection of poems Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) is considered in light of the expansive currents of Morse Creek and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, near Port Angeles.

Even at nearly six-hundred pages in length, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life is a highly readable and scholarly biography, held together with more than ten years of research and insights gained from library archives and hundreds of interviews conducted by Sklenicka herself. In the process of writing a humanizing story of an all-too-often mythologized writer, Sklenicka proves to be a relentless researcher and an agile literary critic, one who can balance meticulous research with some revitalizing readings of Raymond Carver's fiction and his more often neglected poetry.