SOURCE: Houston, Robert. “A Stunning Inarticulateness.” Nation 233, no. 1 (4 July 1981): 23–5.

In the following review, Houston regards “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” as emblematic of Carver's short stories.

Raymond Carver is a pernicious alchemist. Take this setting, for example, from the beginning of the title story of his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: “The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from someplace else.”

Nearly all of the elements of a Carver story are here: people with the most ordinary of local habitations and names, rootless, with busted marriages behind them, who drink cheap gin at kitchen tables...