Short Cuts

by Raymond Carver. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1993. 157 pages. $9.95 paper.

Raymond Carver's short stories seem pretty unpromising material for narrative film. Anchored in churning moods and voices moiling for gold, they lack the plotted base and natural externalization of all conflict necessary to the keen appetite of the film studio project. They seem an especially poor choice for Robert Altman, who typically trolls the national unconscious for big-catch metaphors (Naskville, The Player), Melvillean perambulations (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us), or sardonic screeds (M*A*S*H, A Wedding). There's nothing big in Carver's writing. His bits and pieces emerge from damp Pacific Northwest basements in rainy mill towns like Clatskanie, Oregon, and Yakima, Washington, and their most gripping qualities are muffled, unfilmable things like slow-bum anxiety ("Put Yourself In My Shoes"), a couple's creepy attraction to a neighbor's empty apartment ("Neighbors"), a funny conversation about picking up for Portland ("Vitamins"). Carver rendered a working man's recollection of dinner in the country as Bunuel might have ("Feathers"), and he managed to describe four adults talking about love in a way that intimated the coming of night ("What We Talk About When We Talk About Love").

He massaged a career from material little more suggestive than pocket litter: funny-to-appalling monologues and dialogues where dead-end depression meets Man Ray-esque juxtapositions of the ugly and the exhilarating. A year after Carver's death, in fact, Frank Lentricchia took a swing at him for piloting American fiction into "a minor, apolitical, domestic fiction of the triumphs and agonies of private individuals operating in 'the private sector'"; Carver's chief crime was that he failed to resist "the Reagan eighties" the way Don DeLillo did ("Don DeLillo," Raritan 8.4 [Spring 1989]: 2). Or did he? Carver set his stories far outside the covert purview of the Pentagon and the CIA, and, compared to DeLillo's glittering archaeologies of power and the quotidian life, they can read as shabbily unambitious. But remoteness, weirdness and private obsession are at the stories' sorry hearts, and in their screenplay adaptation of 10 of them, Altman and his co-writer, Frank Barhydt, locate a pattern of cultural blips in them that, together, trace an impressive cultural palimpsest. Carver, as much as Altman, tends to tell stories that reach to articulate a "something" outside its bounds that Pauline Kael, writing about the filmmaker, once called "thistle down." Her example was McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which fused Leonard Cohen spracbsung with Pacific Northwest frontier poetry to make something like a Sartrean tall tale told by Chaucer. She argued that Altman's failures were due more often than not to his stories being inadequate scaffolding for his intangible subjects. In adapting the 10 stories, Altman and Barhydt have prized them open to expose overlapping plot points in dozens of webbily intricate, thistledown ways. They have also altered many of the characters' class affiliations (the most extreme being from school teacher to doctor) and shifted the "menace" Carver's characters typically live in onto the concatenated and irrational scrim of political blundering, social engineering, official lying, urban violence and fatalism that composes contemporary Los Angeles.

The finished script has been handsomely published with Don Bachardy's bright watercolors of the principal actors (all looking uncomfortably strained in the neck) and Tess Gallagher's irritating foreword and afterword. The packaging is attractive, the typeface friendly, but (you find yourself asking) who reads screenplays? Last spring Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo) told me that in his experience films "rarely get better than on the page," so it's worth reading them to see how film has failed in the translation. But because screenplays are basically blueprints, sets of instructions to everyone on the set, most are read as secondary to the produced images on screen. Short Cuts (which features dialogue inclining to "Oh, Rick" exchanges) differs from this model in its beautifully laconic way with conversation and its feeling for how lives brush up against other lives. Reading Short Cuts it's possible to slow down the film's quick associative glances from story to story and follow out some of their branching implications. The story Lentricchia demonized, for example, "A Small, Good Thing," is now something of a pole star for the collection, a place where "They're Not Your Husband," "Jerry and Molly and Sam," "Will You Please Be Quiet Please?" all gravitate: when, driving home to a drunken husband, Doreen of "They're Not Your Husband" (nicely played by Lily Tomlin) hits the Finnigan boy you can almost watch each story's perspective widen. If there is a rule to this translation, in fact, it is that where Carver represents lives in morbid isolation Altman and Barhydt revisit them in varying stages of toxic and regenerative propinquity. There will be more than one death in the film, but mostly the stories bump each other, all silky (but deforming) fender benders.