Trouble man

While Sklenicka belabors the framing of Carver’s life with explanatory primers on popular history or the nature of alcoholism as a disease - passages that informed readers will want to skip - she also illuminates the fiction with the life. She suggests, for instance, that the dead girl in the story “So Much Water Close to Home’’ is an image of Ray himself as “the one beyond help’’; in “Menudo,’’ a late story about Carver’s marriage, she points out that “an unfaithful husband obsessively rakes leaves, trying to create order in a neighborhood where marriages are falling apart,’’ which echoes a similar image in “Intimacy.’’ “It’s the kind of detail,’’ she writes, “that serves Carver as an objective correlative for an emotion without standing out as imagery.’’ One wishes for more such insights in a book too often given to dogged minutiae.