What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

Published 1981 · 1 pages · 35,789 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction, Southern & Regional American Fiction

How hard is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to read?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
Carver strips his prose to the bone. The vocabulary is aggressively plain: kitchen tables, whiskey, cigarettes, TV sets. Words like 'chiffonier' or 'muslin' are the rare exceptions in a lexicon built from monosyllables and the blunt nouns of working-class American life. No reader will reach for a dictionary.
Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
Sentences are short, declarative, and paratactic, connected by 'and' and 'but' rather than subordinate clauses. Dialogue drives most stories, and the dialogue itself is clipped to fragments. The effect resembles Hemingway pushed further toward silence, with compound sentences rarely exceeding fifteen words.
Abstraction: 42 out of 100
The stories operate entirely through concrete surface detail: people drink, smoke, argue, stare at furniture. Abstract ideas about love, loss, and human connection emerge only through what characters do and fail to say. The title story stages a philosophical conversation about love, but even there Mel McGinnis circles the question through anecdotes rather than theory.
Information density: 35 out of 100
Carver's method is radical compression, not accumulation. Each story offers a single scene or situation with minimal backstory. The spare surface means there is little to track per page, though every omitted detail carries weight. The reading pace is fast, the emotional processing slow.
Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
The hallmark of Carver's minimalism is the iceberg: what matters most is never stated. In 'The Bath,' the baker's menacing phone calls are never explained to the parents. In 'Tell the Women We're Going,' the murder arrives in a single flat sentence after pages of mundane cruising. 'Popular Mechanics' ends with an image that implies a baby torn apart without saying so. The reader must supply the emotional meaning the prose withholds.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Objects accumulate quiet symbolic weight: the yard-sale furniture in 'Why Don't You Dance?' stands for a dismantled life, the slugs in 'I Could See the Smallest Things' suggest decay beneath suburban surfaces, the gazebo in 'Gazebo' evokes a lost pastoral innocence. These symbols are embedded in ordinary objects rather than literary apparatus, operating through association rather than allegory.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Carver maintains a cool, uninflected surface that refuses to judge or sentimentalize his characters. The gap between what people say and what they mean generates consistent situational irony: Mel's drunken philosophy about love, Burt's 'serious talk' that never happens, L.D.'s promised 'one more thing' that never comes. The author's sympathy and detachment coexist without resolution.
Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
Nearly every story in the collection refuses closure. 'The Bath' cuts off mid-crisis with the child's fate unknown. 'Popular Mechanics' ends on a horrifying ambiguity. 'Gazebo' closes with 'In this, too, she was right' without saying what she was right about. The title story dissolves into darkness and heartbeats. Carver's endings are doors left open onto uncertainty, inviting the reader to sit with discomfort rather than resolution.
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
Each story is a self-contained vignette, told in chronological order with a single point of view. There are no timeline jumps, no nested narratives, no formal experiments. The collection's structure is the short story sequence itself, with thematic echoes across stories but no connective architecture. The simplicity of form is the point.

How What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is regarded

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where What We Talk About When We Talk About Love sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (64 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iv (irony iv)
But then he could not think what it could possibly be.
Genre: Novel
Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.

Where the story of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love takes place

  • Working-class Pacific Northwest and California, 1970s (1970 to 1980), the main setting
  • Yakima, Washington, 1940s (Dummy's pond) (1942 to 1950)

7 things that are true of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, with the passage for each

  1. The collection opens with a man who sets out his whole bedroom suite in his front yard.

    In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.

  2. In 'Viewfinder' a man with hooks for hands sells the narrator a Polaroid of his own house.

    A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.

  3. In 'The Bath' a baker's phone call about an uncollected cake costs sixteen dollars.

    “The cake,” the voice said. “Sixteen dollars.”

  4. In 'Tell the Women We're Going' one rock is used on both girls.

    Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s.

  5. In 'So Much Water' the men tie the dead girl to a tree with nylon cord and go on fishing.

    He got some nylon cord and tied it to her wrist and then looped the rest around a tree.

  6. In 'A Serious Talk' Burt takes six pies, one for every ten times Vera betrayed him.

    He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

  7. In the title story the narrator is Nick, and the gin runs out as the room goes dark.

    Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table. “Gin’s gone,” Mel said.

Scenes in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Frye would name

22 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Sparagmos, Tell the Women We're Going
He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. A bloodless account of the killing of the two girls with a rock.
Alazon, Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
He told Melody he'd worked on the moon shots. He told my daughter he was close friends with the astronauts. Ross, the braggart fixer who can't fix the TV.
Demonic imagery, So Much Water So Close to Home
took their cooking things and eating things back down to the river and washed them where the girl was. The men wash dishes beside the corpse, a demonic image of the communal feast.
Pathos, The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
Did in his wife with a hammer and drowned himself. Dummy's killing and death by drowning bring the pond story to its sacrificial end.
Pharmakos, Popular Mechanics
But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. The baby is the sacrificial victim of the parents' contest, torn between them.
Hamartia, Sacks
“I don't know what came over me then, Les. Fifty-five years old. Grown kids. I knew better than that.” The father's fatal misstep opens the affair that ends his marriage.

Books that share these scenes with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

About the author

Raymond Carver