Neorealism and its Domestic Burdens in Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Ann Beattie’s “The Lawn Party”

Abstract

Minimalism, as a literary movement in the 1970s United States, attracted considerable attention due to its use of sparse descriptive prose and the collective foregrounding of language and reflexivity. This seemingly new fiction is addressed in this paper by scoping a short story production from doyens of this genre, namely Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. This paper will focus on the ingrained commentary on the inner lives of characters as they come to terms with a new socio-economic way of being, and how their daily flaws and frailties contribute to a new narrative structure and a constant awareness of self. Carver’s meditation on city life and the layers of that old emotion of love is as relevant today as its influence on the writing of its time. Beattie’s fractured telling of the realities and little pleasures of a disconnected family speaks to the tonal and multimodal representation of craft, language, and the use of irony. Together, these two tales may be said to have built up a deceptive profundity which turns out to be a swift yet sanguine meditation on the mundanities and intimacies of a newly awakened life and audience. Kim Herzinger’s arguments about the relative selfreflections and highly conscious use of prose in this new fiction provide the critical background needed to situate these texts, enmeshed with the contrastive narrative strictures discussed by Lee Konstantinou vis-à-vis the postmodern problem. James Nagel’s records of the changes in American short fiction post-Civil War and its subsequent history of moving from realism to something by a reified minimalism are also drawn upon to show how Carver and Beattie serve as examples of journaling the minutiae of sensible lives in an often-insensible generational epoch.