A Small, Good Thing (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Minimalism

Carver's work is in the tradition of realism. When he began to publish his short stories in the 1970s, the dominant mode of literary fiction was not realism but what was sometimes called metafiction, a complex, experimental form that was as much about writing itself as about telling a story. This kind of postmodernist writing was practiced by writers such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Carver was not attracted to this form, and he returned to the earlier literary tradition of realism, in which the writer is more interested in presenting mundane, everyday life as it is experienced by the ordinary person. However, Carver's realism was markedly different from its nineteenth-century form, in which the elements of fiction such as character and setting were described at length and in great detail.

In contrast, Carver's work is associated with the literary movement known as minimalism, which came to dominate American short story writing in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term is a problematic one and applies more to Carver's earlier stories, up to and including the collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), than to the more filled-out stories in Cathedral (1983).

Minimalism is a pared down form of realism that is often distinguished more by what it leaves out than what it puts in. Novelist and short story writer, John Barth, who is known as a maximalist rather than a minimalist, described it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986 as "terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly plotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced fiction" (quoted in Randolph Paul Runyon's Reading Raymond Carver). In Understanding Raymond Carver, Arthur M. Saltzman defines minimalism as short fiction that features "flatness of narrative tone, extreme sparseness of story, an obsession with the drab and the quotidian, a general avoidance of extensive rumination on the page, and, in sum, a striking restraint in prose style."

Minimalism has been used to describe a wide variety of writers, including, in addition to Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Robison, Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff, and others. But no writer labeled a minimalist has welcomed the term as a description of his or her work, and most writers would deny the existence of a single "minimalist school." Carver himself, although often regarded as a leader of the minimalists, rejected the term as applied to his work. In an interview (reprinted in Reading Raymond Carver), he told William L. Stull:

I'll be glad to see the appellation [minimalism] fade so that writers can be talked about as writers and not lumped together in groups where they usually don't belong. It's a label, and labels are unattractive to the people attached to the labels.

Carver also pointed out in the same interview that writers labeled as minimalists were very different from one another, a fact that tended to undermine the validity of the term.

By the late 1980s, the term minimalist was on the wane in critical discourse and there was even a backlash against it. Much of this was in reaction to writers of lesser talent than Carver who tended to imitate the form of his work without producing the same effect. Some critics argued that stories that adhered too closely to a minimalist style were deficient in terms of the range of emotions expressed and in depth of characterization.

Compare & Contrast

• 1980s: Carver writes mainly about people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, and during the 1980s, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States increases. Homelessness becomes a large social problem. It is caused by the lack of affordable housing, higher rates of joblessness, and reductions in public welfare programs that take place during the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981 – 89).
  Today: Homelessness remains a social problem that successive governments fail to tackle. Housing prices continue to rise, and people working in minimum-wage jobs are increasingly unable to afford them. There are no accurate national figures on the number of homeless people in the United States. However, by way of example, in Los Angeles in 2005, an estimated 85,000 people experience homelessness every day, according to the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center, Los Angeles. In New York, an estimated 37,000 people are in shelters every night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, New York. This figure is the highest number of homeless in New York since the Great Depression.
• 1980s: The plot of "A Small, Good Thing" turns on telephone calls received by the husband and wife. In the 1980s, not everyone has answering machines, and there are no features such as Caller ID. Cordless phones first appear around 1980. However, they have limited range and poor sound quality and can easily be intercepted by another cordless phone. In 1986, the Federal Communications Commission grants cordless phones a different frequency, but there are still problems with range and sound quality.
  Today: With features such as voice mail and call waiting, people have many ways of receiving telephone calls and messages. Cellular or wireless telephones are nearly as common as traditional wired telephones. Millions of people use them. They have an array of functions, enabling the user to store information, make to-do lists, keep track of appointments, send or receive email, get news and other information, and play simple games. According to a study commissioned by Motorola, cell phones are changing the way people live and work. The study finds that cell phones give people a sense of personal power. Young people in particular use cell phones to send text messages, often using what has been called "generation text," which incorporates abbreviations that young people all over the world recognize.
• 1980s: The number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents is lower than in the 1970s. The death rate falls further during the early years of the decade before rising again in every year from 1985 to 1988. In 1988, there are 48,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes.
  Today: Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from two through thirty-three years of age (based on 2000 data). However, traffic fatalities are falling. In 2003, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles of travel falls to a historic low of 1.48, with 42,643 people killed. Much of the decrease is attributable to increased use of seat belts and a reduction in the number of people who drive while over the legal limit for alcohol.