Essay: They’re not your husband, by Raymond Carvers From the beginning of mankind there has been a lot of different ideals of gender roles. Years ago it was only the men who went to work and they were considered as the breadwinner of the family.

Raymond Carver (1938 to 1988, Oregon, USA) is on a lot of top ten short story writer of all times lists. I have read and posted on five of his stories. I recognize he has a tremendous talent and can do wonders with a small amount of material.

I was fully convinced of his brilliance when I read his story on the last day in the life of Anton Chekhov,. (By a cosmic coincidence it was Carver's last story.) I am put off a bit by the people in Carver's stories. I know it is not a good reading habit to judge stories and novels on how the people in the stories relate to those in your world but I am a bit turned off by the prevalence of alcoholics, drug users, wife abusers and just seemingly brutally ignorant people in his stories. If this shows a lack of artistic detachment on my part or a lack of sympathy for the people in most of his stories, then so be it.

It does not mean I do not appreciate his genius and I will keep reading his stories. 'They're Not Your Husband' will make a lot of people cringe at the brutal seemingly valueless lives depicted in the story.

The husband in the story has to be a nightmare figure for every married woman concerned her charms have faded. The wife works as a waitress in a diner.

Basically that means a restaurant with a counter, a simple place. The husband is sitting at the counter, hoping to get a free meal. Two men come in and scrutinize his wife from behind as she bends over. Not knowing who the man is, they make a number of really rude remarks about her body, concluding with a suggestion that they guess she can still attract men because 'some like them fat'.

Stb erom upgrade 20 0c 1. The husband is really upset by this. When he and the wife are going to bed, he basically tells her she needs to lose some weight and tells her to stand naked in front of the mirror. OK it takes either an idiot or a total uncaring brute to say something like this to his wife, perhaps particularly when she is the only one working in the family.

He goads her onto a diet and when she begins to lose weight but looks haggard and feels week her co-workers express concern over her health. She tells her husband and he says to her ' They're Not Your Husband'. After she has lost nine pounds or so, the husband is back in the diner. He is sitting next to a man he does not know and he tries to draw the man into a conversation about the body of his wife.

This is male bonding at its worse. This is a very well done story. Carver is considered a minimalist (he would have been great on Twitter!).

He does do a whole lot in this story. It appeared in his collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. If you search for it, you can read it online.

Please share your experience with Carver with us.

Raymond Carver was one of a handful of contemporary short story writers credited with reviving what was once thought of as a dying literary form. His stories mainly take place in his native Pacific Northwest region; they are peopled with the type of lower-middle-class characters the author was familiar with while he was growing up. In a New York Review of Books article, Thomas R. Edwards describes Carver's fictional world as a place where 'people worry about whether their old cars will start, where unemployment or personal bankruptcy are present dangers, where a good time consists of smoking pot with the neighbors, with a little cream soda and M & M's on the side.. Carver's characters are waitresses, mechanics, postmen, high school teachers, factory workers, door-to-door salesmen. [Their surroundings are] not for them a still unspoiled scenic wonderland, but a place where making a living is as hard, and the texture of life as drab, for those without money, as anywhere else.'

Carver's own life paralleled that of one of his characters. Born in an Oregon logging town, the author was married and the father of two before he was twenty years old. Also like his characters, Carver worked at a series of low paying jobs: he 'picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex,' according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine profile of the author. Carver's wife at the time, continues Weber, 'worked for the phone company, waited tables, [and] sold a series of book digests door-to-door.' Not coincidentally, 'of all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class,' as Ray Anello observes in a Newsweek article.