Cody's Reviews > Cathedral

For reasons that become increasingly clear to me as I age, Raymond Carver will always be my short story God. Having just put down Cathedral, I think I can put my finger on it a bit better than usual. So grab a beer, put your feet up—here’s the ashtray. I’m gonna do a little bit of testifying.

As much as I’d like to be Rocketman or Ishmael, the fact of the matter is that I’m nothing more or less than a character in a Carver story. I’m a person—unexceptional by almost every measure, good and bad—just trying to make it through today to even begin worrying about tomorrow. I come from the working class; my childhood’s lasting snapshots are populated by pop-top Coors and Camel non-filters, horseshoe pits and sunwrecked lawn chairs. Alcohol featured prominently into my cosmology early on, and my behaviors came to resemble the generation that preceded me. Hey, child is the father of man and all that.

But this isn’t just my life story; it’s the life story of almost everyone I know. And for we unsupervised children of suburban violence and distaff, Carver is our Poet Laureate and Patron Saint. He understood that, more often than not, life does not hinge around a single declarative moment—it is a series of minor tragedies that we swallow and retain, eventually holding enough to mold ourselves into a vaguely human shape. It is that not-fatal decision to always have one more nightcap; to blow off a chunk of a fingertip with a cobbling of fireworks; to maintain that there is something holy about drinking in parks with your friends as a form of communion.

In other words, Raymond Carver was the chronicler of the quintessence of my parents' generation and my own in 20th-century America: people fucking up unspectacularly in-between the chain link fences of our own private Shangri-La’s. You won’t suffer another like us.