At university, an unrequited love (or unconsummated crush, I’ll never know) told me to read Carver. I’m not sure there could be a better introduction. In the finest Carver stories, that unspoken force called literature stands just in the next room and, at certain moments, we are allowed to glimpse it, like neighbours who have snuck into its apartment, finding it gone but frozen with awareness of its having been. It is usually an everyday breakdown of reality, by a car accident and a cake or a broken fridge, or, in this case, a letter pushed under a door, that affords us this glimpse. Why I think ‘Blackbird Pie’ stands out among the Carver stories I love is that here, quite literally, literature itself is what intrudes, what pulls at the fabric of living, of all that rough sentiment Carver writes so expertly.
First published in The New Yorker, July 7, 1986; collected in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly, 1988/Harvill Press, 1993
A Personal Anthology 