Fitxa club de lectura anglès A Small, good thing de Raymond Carver

A Small, Good, Thing (1989) by Raymond Carver About the story: "A Small, Good Thing," an award-winning story by American short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, was published in Carver's third major collection of stories, Cathedral, in 1983. In his first two collections, Carver had established himself as a new and compelling voice in American literature and a master of the short story form. In Cathedral, he took his craft to new levels of insight into the human condition. "A Small, Good Thing" is generally regarded as one of Carver's finest stories, in which he goes beyond the spare narratives and unrelieved bleakness of some of his earlier work. The story is about Scotty, an eight-year-old boy who dies three days after being hit by a car as he walks to school. In language that is simple on the surface but reveals a host of telling details, Carver depicts the grief of the parents and their quarrel and final reconciliation with a baker who was baking a birthday cake for Scotty. Although tragic and disturbing, "A Small, Good Thing" conveys a message of forgiveness, kindness, and the healing power of human community.

About the author:

Raymond Carver (born May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Ore., U.S.—died Aug. 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Wash.), American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life.

Carver was the son of a sawmill worker. He married a year after finishing high school and supported his wife and two children by working as a janitor, gas-station attendant, and delivery man. He became seriously interested in a writing career after taking a creative-writing course at Chico State College (now California State University, Chico) in 1958. His short stories began to appear in magazines while he studied at Humboldt State College (now Humboldt State University) in Arcata, Calif. (B.A., 1963). Carver’s first success as a writer came in 1967 with the story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” and he began writing fulltime after losing his job as a textbook editor in 1970. The highly successful short-story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) established his reputation.

Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 and was repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism in the 1970s, while continuing to turn out short stories.

After conquering his drinking problem in the late 1970s, he taught for several years at the University of Texas at El Paso and at Syracuse University, and in 1983 he won a literary award whose generous annual stipend freed him to again concentrate on his writing full-time. His later short-story collections were What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I’m Calling From (1988).

While his short stories were what made his critical reputation, he was

also an accomplished poet in the realist tradition of Robert Frost.

Carver’s poetry collections include At Night the Salmon Move (1976), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985), and Ultramarine (1986). He died of lung cancerat age 50.

In his short stories Carver chronicled the everyday lives and problems of the working poor in the Pacific Northwest. His blue-collar characters are crushed by broken marriages, financial problems, and failed careers, but they are often unable to understand or even articulate their own anguish.

Carver’s stripped-down, minimalist prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power. He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English-language short story in the late 20th century.

However, controversy arose over the nature of Carver’s writing—and even his lasting literary reputation—in the early 21st century. It was revealed that his long-time editor, Gordon Lish, had drastically changed many of Carver’s early stories. While Lish’s significant involvement in Carver’s writing had long been suspected, the extent of his editing became public knowledge when, in 2007, Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, announced that she was seeking to publish the original versions of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (which appeared as Beginners in the U.K. and also as part of the Library of America’s Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [both 2009]).

Lish was shown to have changed characters’ names, cut the length of many stories (over 75 percent of the text in two cases), and altered the endings of some stories. However, most of Carver’s famously terse sentences were his own, as was the hallmark bleak workingclass milieu of the short stories.

Other interesting information: http://fictionwritersreview.com/shoptalk/stories-we-love-a-small-good-thingby-raymond-carver/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/13/small-good-things/ https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/raymond-carver-the-art-offiction-no-76-raymond-carver

Topics for Discussion:

Do you consider Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing" a pessimistic or optimistic story?

What do you interpret as the main/central conflict in "A Good Small Thing"?

How does the visit to the bakery resolve some of the conflict in the story of "A Small, Good Thing"?

How does the Baker change from the beginning to the end of the story in "A Small, Good Thing"?