The right is using Raymond Carver as a masculine archetype. This author says they got it wrong

SAM DINGMAN: In a time of increasing tribalization on social media, it’s harder and harder to find anything resembling a nuanced discussion of a thorny cultural issue. Personally, I find myself turning increasingly to Substack for such things, and that’s where I recently happened upon a spirited debate about representations of masculinity in popular literature.

The conversation was, ironically, kicked off by a post on X from a writer named Alex Perez. The post read, quote, “Young men should be reading Ray Carver, Richard Ford, and Denis Johnson. They should become regulars at a bar that attracts working class dudes and disaffected lawyers. They should listen to 'Love and Theft' by Dylan. They’ll be a little cliche at first, but they’ll make it.”

Now, there’s obviously a lot to unpack there — and that’s exactly what Perez’s fellow writers did on Substack. One of them, Zach Dundas, wrote a post I particularly enjoyed, reacting in particular to the Raymond Carver part of Perez’s declaration.

In an essay titled “The Actually Existing Raymond Carver” Dundas took issue with the idea that writers like Denis Johnson and Carver represented some sort of populist masculine archetype.

ZACH DUNDAS: I think that there’s a little bit of, like, shaping their legacies to fit a conversation that’s happening in 2025 that was not happening when they were actively writing.

DINGMAN: As you put it, Raymond Carver existed in a place and a time, i.e. the non-metropolitan West of mid-century. Talk a little bit about that place and that era and what you feel like is important to understand about that in terms of contextualizing Carver’s stories.

DUNDAS: He was from a sort of series of small towns that were and are very working class towns. He was born in Clatskanie, Oregon. He spent a lot of his formative years in Yakima, Washington. His biography is quite complex. He went lots of different places. His final port of call was Port Angeles, Washington. He lived there at the end of his life. That’s another working-class sort of logging town.

So he was in this milieu of vital and vibrant, but also small and industrial places — like Yakima, Washington, is a is a very substantial place. It’s a city, but it is an agricultural hub. So although it’s a big town, it’s not like a Seattle or a Portland.

That’s what he would have grown up around. These places that were very blue collar, but also where there was a lot of fluidity between blue collar and academia that maybe is a little different than we think of it now.

DINGMAN: One of the examples that you cite there is that Carver himself went to a series of small state schools. ... But these were the kinds of places that didn’t have very prestigious names in the world of academia, but where somebody like Raymond Carver — who himself was working a series of blue-collar and gray-collar jobs — could take classes with creative writing teachers who had just come from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Zach Putnam

DUNDAS: Yeah. He studied with John Gardner at Chico State University. He spent some time at Sacramento State University. This kind of series of state schools, they are workaday schools in these towns that are mid-sized cities. They have their own vibe, their own milieu.

And I grew up in one of those towns. I grew up in Missoula, Montana. It’s a world that’s very familiar to me, like the mid-sized college town of the interior West. There’s a specific kind of vibe that took root there, I guess I would say. A lot of interplay between working class worlds and academic and artistic worlds in a way that is pretty distinctive to those kind of towns.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and am I right that there’s a contrast to be made here, particularly around this time between that sort of world — where, as you write, you might come across a tree surgeon who also writes narrative nonfiction or an auto mechanic who also has a newspaper column — and a place like New York City of that era, where there was more an idea that like, “Oh, well, if you’re a writer, you hang out at the Algonquin Hotel with all of these other very, you know, well-educated, kind of high-minded, sarcastic writers’ writers, who who don’t have as much connection to actual working life as folks like Carver would have”?

DUNDAS: Yeah. I do think that it’s a bit different than the sort of stereotypical literary circle of a bigger city.

DINGMAN: Absolutely. As you write in your piece, you talk about, “the land of the bartender poet, the former trail crew hand with a short story collection, an ecosystem of perpetual students with raw talent and day jobs or night jobs,” as the case may have been.

How do you feel like that shows up qualitatively in Carver’s writing? In the piece, you sort of suggest the idea that that kind of experience maybe makes the writing less formally experimental or adventurous or conceptual, but instead somewhat more — I don’t want to say honest — but reflective of of the way life is lived.

DUNDAS: I mean, I think also that I think one thing that I was trying to argue in the pieces that that is the kind of storytelling that was really valued at the time. You could find innumerable short stories from the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s that were sort of set in the kinds of middle class, working class that sort of like hazy border between the two with this sort of somewhat kitchen sink realism, lots of straightforward story structure, no hints of magical realism or surrealism.

DINGMAN: Yeah. But it also seems like part of what you’re arguing is and in fact, as you say in the piece, “It would be a stretch to say that this career gave Carver some significant proletarian fan base or working class street cred.”

DUNDAS: Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, there’s I guess this is the response to this idea that maybe once upon a time, a writer like Raymond Carver, whose stories are very mysterious and odd and, I don’t know, I was a kid. I don’t know if I remember everything perfectly, but I kind of know what people were reading on more of an everyday basis. And they were reading Stephen King and big, thick James Clavell novels like “Shogun.” And they were reading “The Hobbit,” and they were reading Louis L’Amour books, and they were reading romance novels.

It’s not as if Raymond Carver was on every night stand in middle class America. He was a very critically acclaimed author. But it’s not that he was the standard fare, I don’t think.

DINGMAN: And if I’m following you correctly, also not necessarily the skeleton key to the mind of the working class man.

DUNDAS: Yeah, I think if you read Raymond Carver story, a lot of strange stuff happens. There’s certainly based on the emotions and turbulence and events and problems that people encounter, but they’re heightened as pieces of art.

It seems pretty clear that there’s no intended sort of documentary purpose there. They’re not like essays. It’s not like Joan Didion writing about something that she observed in California life at the time and doing so with a lot of art and a lot of style and a lot of wit, but still basing what she’s writing on observed reality.

DINGMAN: Just because he was writing fiction in a place where there was, as you said earlier, a fluidity between what we might think of as blue collar life and artistic expression, it doesn’t mean that his fiction is a direct reflection of that life. It’s just, as as you say at the end of the piece, where he was calling from.

DUNDAS: Right? It’s of the time and place, but it’s not a literal portrayal of the time and place, I don’t think. I mean, that’s what I would say.

DINGMAN: So what do you go to Carver for? What do you find in his work that you take with you?

DUNDAS: I mean, I think there’s this kind of sense of mystery. And the way that life works on our emotions and the way that our various flaws play out.

I guess I’m maybe the wrong person to ask. I don’t know if I go to fiction looking for the male psyche. I’ve got one of my own that I wrestle with all the time.

So it’s not the first reason I read for, I guess I would say.