Cathedral by Raymond Carver (review)

168 Western American Literature Harmony lives barely above the poverty level on the edge of the Las Vegas desert. She was married to a man who left her, but neither has bothered to get a divorce. Her daughter goes to high school, smokes marijuana, and has sex with her boyfriend solely because he is good-looking and has a nice car. Through him she is introduced to a wealthy, middle-aged voyeur, who likes to photograph athletic high school boys in the nude and good-looking young girls in antique underwear. The voyeur proposes marriage, Pepper accepts, but is immediately “discovered” in her dancing class and offered the lead in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel, where her mother works. Pepper decides to marry the voyeur and accept the job, but Harmony is fired on her thirty-ninth birthday because “it wouldn’t look right” having a mother and daughter working in the same show. Harmony’s husband decides he wants her back, and she leaves to join him in Reno (on a southbound bus!). This could have been a fun bit of fluff. But it isn’t. The characters are pitiful but empty. Their lives are out ofcontrol forno particular reason except their own shallowness and lack of intelligence. But worst of all, they are dull. Usually if people like that start to tell you their stories in a bar, some excuse can be found to move away. Frankly, I felt rather trapped in the reading— by two unreal, boring, dimwitted females. * * * NOTE: I wish to acknowledge assistance with this review from Ms. Barbara Beverly and Ms. Julia Angelica. Ms. Beverly, an advisee English major, is one of the five Principals in the Lido de Paris at the Stardust. (There is no lead in that show.) Ms. Angelica, my Research Assistant for several years, was a dancer in Hallelujah Hollywood at MGM Grand. She recently received simultaneous degrees in sociology and English with a four-point in each and received the Silver Medallion, the Uni­ versity’s highest academic honor. Ms. Beverly courageously finished the novel, feeling “a little sorry for them at the end.” Ms. Angelica did not. CHARLES L. ADAMS University of Nevada, Las Vegas Cathedral. By Raymond Carver. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. 238 pages, $4.95.) A red-eyed peacock startles a couple visiting acquaintances who have an extraordinarily ugly baby. A man tells his estranged wife that he’s about to go crazy because of his plugged-up ear. A wife comes home to find her unem­ ployed husband unaware that the refrigerator has quit working and the food is thawing out. In Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, his third collection of short fiction, stories are pared down to the banal details that compose most of our lives. And yet these very banal details explode in the mind with reverberating and ominous innuendo. Frank Kermode has declared that Carver is a master of the short form, and Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing,” which is included in this collection, was Reviews 169 this year’s first place winner in William Abraham’s distinguished annual “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.” There is no melodrama in Carver’s spare, laconic, but brilliantly evoca­ tive fiction. “Vitamins,” for instance, begins: “I had a job and Patti didn’t. I worked a few hours a night for the hospital.” Patti does get herself a job, however, “for her self-respect.” She sells vitamins door to door. Eventually the narrator attempts to have an affair with one of his wife’s co-workers, but it is aborted by the advances of a black man at a “spade club” the couple goes to. The frustrated narrator returns home. His wife hears him and, think­ ing she has over-slept, gets up and dresses. The story concludes: I couldn’t take any more tonight. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m looking for something,” I said. I knocked some stuff out ofthe medi­ cine chest. Things rolled into the sink. “Where’s the aspirin?” I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn’t care. Things kept falling. Things do keep falling in Carver’sfictional world...