What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I found this collection of short stories, coming in at just over 150 pages in total, very natural to "get," tonally, and yet almost impossible to describe. This is, of course, a testament to the difference between Raymond Carver's ability to express and emote through sparse language and subtext and my own inability to cram three sentences of meaningful reflection together. This is about loss and sadness, but the very quiet and understated kind, not the big dumb tearjerking melodrama and tragedy so many lesser authors might have attempted. There's a melancholy here, but a subtle one. A handful of these stories end in overt tragedy or at least heavily imply an impending loss, but most of them are just quick little slices of late nineteenth Americana. The whole thing feels like late afternoon, late summer. Not evening, not fall, but, you know. Close.