The Bath ends with the baker following up on the mother about the unclaimed birthday cake. It is familiar since it’s a rework, or rather an extension, of The Bath, a story where a mother orders a cake for her child’s birthday but the child is in coma due to a car accident. The isolation of the man on a train, on the way to visit his son, in the story Compartment is clearer and it climaxes when he realizes that he is on the wrong compartment, on the wrong car, and probably on the wrong direction.įor readers familiar with Carver’s earlier stories, A Small, Good Thing is a surprise. It is also as much a delusion and an inability to face realities outside that house. In Chef’s House, the time spent at the house is an isolation in itself. In Feathers, the couple isolate that singular moment at the dinner and try to build a future from it. These first two illustrate a dominant theme in the collection: isolation. The man’s happiness and recovery are threatened when Chef asks them to leave. Chef’s House is about an alcoholic man who rents Chef’s House to patch things up with his wife. These two things are seared in the couple’s mind, even when things start changing in their marriage. In the first story Feathers, a couple is invited to have dinner at a work mate’s place who has an ugly baby and a smelly peacock. Sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be a point except to portray the lives of the working class. One can sometimes feel that the stories are his or her stories.

There is often the feeling that one is not reading fiction. The stories in this collection are comprised of the kind of people you know, such as your office mate or your neighbor. Cathedral has 12, and although it has the least number, its stories are some of Carver’s longest, and in some sense, more conventional. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love has 17. The first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, has 22. A noticeable change is the dwindling number of stories. One can sense a shift in style in the stories contained in Cathedral. Cathedral is Raymond Carver’s next collection of short stories after What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a collection that was heavily edited, and to some extent influenced, by the author’s editor, Gordon Lish.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver