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Rating: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is a book from 1976 written by Raymond Carver and contains 22 stories.
It is Carver's first collection, who will soon be recognized as one of the foremost exponents of the short story. His stories, his style, will mark a turning point in the genre. The story that gives the collection its title will be taken up by Robert Altman and staged in his famous "Short Cuts".
And it is indeed America that Carver tells about, but it's certainly not the one we all know. It's not even the dark side of the USA. It's not necessarily a snapshot of a hidden America made of losers, high-stakes dramas, uncomfortable revelations, or who knows what.
Carver tells everyday life. His characters are ordinary. Brief stories of lived life, a bored couple, a father and son, a polite and good-natured fat man who eats for two in a diner, a husband asking his wife to lose a little weight... Nothing special, yet his stories immediately capture you, perhaps because the common reader's identification is almost total.
Why does Carver manage to capture attention so radically by telling about normality, which is also devoid of twists and turns?
Perhaps because what he tells, how he tells it, the dialogues he uses are somehow familiar to us. Carver does not express any judgments, there is no moral. His stories are short snapshots of life—flows of hours passing inexorably, gray and obtuse. Lazy days engaged in a silly and monotonous merry-go-round around the maid of honor: the routine.
Stories that do not start and do not end, without ethics, without judgments, without morality, without teaching, without revelations or twists.
And although sometimes in the protagonists' actions, peculiar behaviors may appear here and there, we are always within the norm, once again, more than ever. Because those protagonists are us, because everyone has a hidden quirk, an unusual procedure, a secret peculiarity, a harmless and obscure mania...
But it's not just this that captures you. What leaves a bitter taste in your mouth is the non-sense of life itself, its flow heedless of any logic, of any justice. Life that is also heedless of chance (which some call "destiny") by which it is easily enticed and deceived.
However, even though Carver never judges his stories and his protagonists, an overwhelming sense of heaviness, precariousness, discomfort looms over all his stories.
Perhaps his stories are many small and very fierce je accuse of modern man who has created and structured his life and society.
And perhaps it is precisely in all this absurd normality (because let's be clear, there's very little NORMAL in our modern Western society) that Carver raises his cry of pain as if to tell us: "but don’t you see how everything is absurd and wrong?"
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