So Much Water So Close to Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide references the murder of women.

Raymond Carver is known for a sparse, understated writing style that leaves the reader to infer much of the significance of the story’s events. A subcategory of Realism, writers of Dirty Realism “are said to depict the seamier or more mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language” (“dirty realism.” Collins English Dictionary. 2022). The term was coined in 1983 by Bill Buford in Granta. The writing tends to be straightforward and matter of fact—free of extended metaphors, elaborate descriptions, and extraneous words. Dialogue may be spare, and characters offer little internal monologue. Plots of Dirty Realist works tend to focus on unextraordinary or unremarkable events—often the sadness and loss of middle-class characters (Kita, Viola. “Dirty Realism in Carver’s Work.” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 5. no. 22, 2014, p. 385). Many of these characters are urban dwellers who may also be “adulterers, alcoholics, women or ethnic minorities, people who experience estrangement, loneliness and disillusionment every single day of their lives” (Kita 385). In this way, the kinds of lives previously regarded as unfit for literary treatment take center stage.

In reading Carver and his contemporaries, it is useful to keep in mind the economic, social, and political tide of the latter 1970s and 1980s. It was a period marked by inflation as oil costs soared, as well as growing unease related to the Cold War. The coarse and gritty tone of Dirty Realism evokes this era. Writers Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Charles Bukowski, and Don DeLillo are frequently cited as other examples of Dirty Realists (Buford, Bill. “Dirty Realism: New Writing from America.” Granta, vol. 8, 1983).