A Small Good Thing

In “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver conjures one of his most famous stories, one that in both content and style exemplifies the writer’s oeuvre. Carver led a peripatetic life and for much of the 1970s battled alcoholism (King, Stephen. “Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories.” The New York Times, 19 November 2009). He leaned toward writing poetry and short stories out of expedience; he could produce either of these forms in a single sitting, allowing for a high turnover despite his sometimes tumultuous lifestyle. “A Small, Good Thing” is one of Carver’s works that helped revitalize the American short story, so examining his approach and what he’s portraying in this story is worthwhile.

Carver conveys a sense of the Weisses’ lives, particularly when he introduces Howard: “Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction—college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment firm. Fatherhood” (379). Howard and Ann seem to have a comfortable social rank and communicate well with professionals like Dr. Francis—but are aware of their difference from, say, the Black family Ann encounters at the hospital. Ann apparently doesn’t have a job and is a full-time homemaker. Carver paints the Weisses as a relatively privileged family, almost oblivious to their good fortune until a careless driver intervenes.

Thereafter, Carver’s main concern is how this intimate domestic drama plays out in the memory-filled family home and in the indifferent hospital—an environment Carver would have known well from his time working as a night custodian at a California hospital in the 1960s (Buzbee, Lewis and Mona Simpson. “Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76.” Paris Review, Issue 88, Summer 1983). Notably, family or friends never appear to help or comfort the Weisses. The story functions as their own private pressure-cooker, and their fears increase with each new non-diagnosis from the baffled doctor. A good marriage between story and form, the piece gives a sense of how Carver mastered the short story: He crafted a tightly focused narrative about a major event in an American family’s life—rather than a sweeping epic, which might demand a bigger canvas.

Carver’s thematically dense short story explores gender roles, race, and social class and evokes the social attitudes of the time (the early 1980s), bringing them into sharp focus through a cloistered and clear-eyed portrayal of a private tragedy. How the Weisses handle the situation seems conditioned by such social attitudes. Ann seems to immediately grasp that something’s wrong with Scotty, but Howard is much more ready to trust Dr. Francis, a fellow man. For example, he says, “‘He’s going to be all right. He’ll wake up in a little while. Dr. Francis knows what’s what’” (380). He then seeks a nurse’s agreement as he tries to cajole Ann into heading home to rest: “‘I was saying she’d want to go home and get a little rest’” (381). Although Howard means well, an air of paternalism carries through thematically in how the story represents gender roles.

Stylistically, Carver uses an omniscient third-person narrator. This enables him to show the characters’ differing attitudes and emotions as he shifts the point of view, which helps reveal the suffering in this intimate setting. In addition, it subtly conveys the social tensions—for example, through the differing attitudes of Ann and Howard and how their fears gradually coalesce into a shared predicament. For example, on page 387, Howard joins Ann at the window, and Carver moves from Ann’s point of view to a shared one: “They both stared out at the parking lot. They didn’t say anything. But they seemed to feel each other’s insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way.”

Another noteworthy craft element is Carver’s economy of language. Although he balked at the tag of “minimalist” (Buzbee, Lewis and Mona Simpson. “Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76.” Paris Review, Issue 88, Summer 1983)—and, indeed, rescued “A Small, Good Thing” after heavy-handed editing by Gordon Lish (King, Stephen. “Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories.” The New York Times, 19 November 2009)—Carver uses precise, unadorned language and syntax throughout the story. Nearly every sentence is declarative, short, and in the active voice. He rarely begins a sentence with anything other than its subject. He uses almost no modifiers, except for a few adverbs here and there; nouns and verbs dominate the narrative’s structure. Carver cleaves to this style even in the story’s most dramatic moments: Scotty’s accident and his death. After Scotty is hit by a car, for example, Carver writes, “His eyes were closed, but his legs moved back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something” (377). In the hands of a different writer, this episode might have lent itself to more purple writing—great gushes of crimson blood, violent spasms, sickening crunches, or thudding impacts. Carver effectively conveys the horror of Scotty’s predicament with an image that’s straightforward yet impactful in the clarity of its incongruity. Carver’s narrative voice makes the writing feel direct, free from artifice or ornamentation. This approach works well for the milieu he’s writing about—one of plain-speaking people, leading somewhat austere, even lonely, lives.