The region to which much of [Raymond Carver's Furious Seasons and Other Stories] is affixed is, roughly, the Pacific Northwest—magnificent scenery notwithstanding, never prime stomping grounds for a major writer. (Kesey, you might say, but he's too much the Merry Prankster to rest easy in the Willamette Valley; likewise Tom Robbins, bard of Puget Sound, who in the end appropriates the entire universe as his private, and cosmic, pinball machine.) Carver, though, has roots somewhere, or most places, between northern California and the Washington-British Columbia border. Not that he has erected his own version of Yoknapatawpha County; one gets a name only here and there (Wenatchee, Yakima, Eureka), and many of the locations go unidentified.

More importantly, Carver has a remarkable feel for the pace of life in these parts. He knows these small one- or two-horse towns, which possess neither the splendor and neuroses of the city nor the purity and boredom of the country. These are neither/nor places, and nothing much is going on down Main Street. The weather doesn't help: "Rain threatens. Already the tops of the hills across the valley are obscured by the heavy grey mist. Quick shifting black clouds with white furls and caps are over the fields and vacant lots in front of the apartment house."

Leaving mere geography behind, Carver leads directly to the heart of the heart of the country. And this location is found in his characters. The men: "He and Gordon Johnson, Mel Dorn, Vern Williams. They play poker, bowl, and fish together…. They are decent men, family men, responsible at their jobs." The women (Lorraine, Iris, Bea, and Doreen, among others) might be single, married, or divorced, they might have kids, a job, or both, but like the men they conduct relatively sane, sensible lives.

These individuals and families, if perhaps scraping by in a tight economy, are not outwardly disturbed…. Unlike many characters today, Carver's do not lean against the wall and hold forth on intellectual subjects; the only such instance in Furious Seasons is when a man, who is reading a biography of Tolstoy, offers that "He has some interesting ideas…. He was quite a character." So much for writing about writers. These people read National Geographic and, I suspect, Reader's Digest, but more likely they're thinking about the weather, or bass and geese, or some everyday sort of thing.

Welcome to Middle America, hovering not far from the West Coast. Yet however ordinary these down-the-block people may seem, within their lives is found Carver's true concern—the terrifying implications of Normal Life, apparently serene but filled with a desperate and hopeless sense of something-gone-wrong…. [In Furious Seasons life is] complicated and tortured in the relationship of one person to another; for it is the pull between two lives, whether over the obstacle of sex or of generation, that is always too strong or too weak. And here is the focus of Carver's vision. As William Gass wrote of other ordinary people, "The loneliness trapped in these figures is overwhelming, and one thinks of the country, and how in the country, space counts for something … that the tyranny of the group can here be claustrophobic, crushing, total."

Clearly, nothing good will come of this. The circumstances vary from story to story, but common to all is a soured domesticity…. And beyond the inability to act is violence—the compulsion toward random action. In this suffocating atmosphere, death is an inevitable consequence of the private nightmare turned actual terror.

Furious Seasons has, in addition to the violence, traces of the bizarre, though not to the same degree as Carver's first book of stories. But if a character is at times pathetic, he is never ludicrous. Carver refuses to set up straw dogs dry enough to self-destruct immediately when touched with easy irony or black humor. These characters are presented cleanly, and Carver is neither patronizing nor sentimental; his compact fiction, written in a simple prose, is full of the emotion that starts in the stomach and moves upward, choking, to the chest and throat. (pp. 132, 134)