ABSTRACT
A scholar of modernist and postmodernist American literature, Alan Wilde asserts that traditional realism “has dwindled among more recent practitioners” into “a pinched and meager resignation, a resentfully cynical acquiescence to things ‘as they are’ and, so it is implied, must be” (4). The alleged diminishment is so pronounced that Wilde labels Carver (along with writers such as Anne Beattie, Mary Robison, and Joan Didion) as catatonic realists: “the descriptive adjective that best suits the responses of Carver’s characters and the strategies that interpret them is catatonic. …” By catatonic, Wilde means that the “only available reactions” for the characters “are tense acquiescence or fury” (112).
