I have a question. Is “Tell the Women We’re Going” related to “So Much Water, So Close to Home”? It seems like the event Claire, in “Water”, refers to reading about in the newspaper is too similar to what happened in “Tell The Women”.
I've never read any Carver, but that reminds me of Tarantino. In Pulp Fiction Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) told John Travolta she had shot a pilot for a TV series where she was a member of an all-girl assassination squad. Well, this is the exact situation in Kill Bill, also starring Uma Thurman.
Watch Short Cuts, a movie by Robert Altman, where several of Carver's stories are drawn together, contemporaneous. Excellent movie. Excellent book. Just re-read it recently and I think I was two stories in before noticing an adjective.
Some of the vignettes(that the right word?) are taken directly from WWTAWWTAL. I believe the others may be based on other stories of his but don't know the source.
If I remember right, the entire collection is occurring at the same time in America and they are inter-related to each other as events unfold. The point of the whole collection is to display strengths and weaknesses in the American culture and society of the day, especially regarding the middle-class. His sparse and trimmed down style makes it a bit more difficult to define, but yes, you seem to have caught an instance of his inter-weaving the stories in his particular version of America.
There was a scene in Law and Order where one of the detectives (Chris Noth?) was searching through the bookcases at a murder scene, pulls out a book, and says "What we talk about when we talk about love." He kind of rolls his eye and tosses it (or something). Don't remember who I was watching it with, but they were like, "that's the worse title I've ever heard." And I was like, "Actually, it's a pretty good collection by Raymond Carver and...." I know, I know... great story, Homer. Way to contribute, kiddo!
Not if you're a cyclops, pirate, or Bond villain. ETA: that just made me think of Jimmy, a one-eyed bartender I used to work with. We used to say shit like, "keep your eye on this guy" or "keep your eye on the road" or whatever. The latter became very popular after he fell asleep drunk in his car on some train tracks and got hit by an Amtrak. He lived. One-eyed Jimmy always lived through his many misadventures. Until he got cancer.
