Fires by Raymond Carver5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ‘At that moment I felt – I knew – that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired. ![]() Just as he is about to do so a woman comes to the dryer, feels the clothes – and inserts two more coins. By the ‘law of the laundromat’ he can dump the clothes within thirty seconds if no one shows up. Carver’s wife is working as a waitress and, with five or six loads of family wash to do before collecting his kids from a party, Carver plants himself in front of a dryer just coming to a halt. ‘Fires’, the title essay, has a marvellous description of fear and loathing in a laundromat in Iowa City. ![]() It is the professorship that goes on the dust-jackets and not the many jobs, which are mentioned dismissively, in passing, in one of the essays in Fires. One can tell Carver is genuine because he makes nothing of it. Most writers would give a right arm for such authentic redneck credentials and one can be sure that most funky jobs listed on blurbs were only held for a couple of weeks during summer vacations. Raymond Carver is a typically American hero, a kind of literary Rocky – janitor, delivery man, sawmill operator, servicestation attendant, an uneducated alcoholic no-hoper who rises to Major Writer status and the Professorship of English at Syracuse University. ![]()
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