Raymond Carver: "A Small, Good Thing"

Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry.

Some notes on this astonishing story, “A Small, Good Thing,” which is among the more famous stories in American history.

-Matthew Weiner makes me think of this story. I’m certain Weiner, who approached his “Mad Men” episodes as short stories, read and paid careful attention to the works of Raymond Carver. Specifically, the ending of “A Small, Good Thing” reminds me of the ending of “The Strategy” (or vice versa). In both cases, we have an improvised family breaking bread over an improvised family-table. In “Good Thing,” the baker has joined the family, and the “table” is part of his general cooking apparatus (and the glaring absence is the dead son’s). In “The Strategy,” Pete has joined the Peggy/Don “family,” and the “table” is a chunk of plastic at Burger Chef (and the glaring absence is Trudy’s, Megan’s, you name it).

-Weiner and Carver both pay exquisite attention to gestures. In trite fiction, we can anticipate the gestures before they happen. “She smiled sadly.” “He spoke with fists clenched.” (The gestures are really just placeholders, verbal detritus.) Weiner wants to surprise you with his gestures—as when Don kisses Peggy’s hand, in a moving, courtly way, or Peggy holds Don’s head in her lap. Raymond Carver has some million-dollar gestures. A woman—whose innocent son has been knifed—wakes with a jolt and asks another victim, not a nurse: “Nurse? What is happening to my child?” The husband, trying to help his wife, says, “Go home. Feed Slug.” And the wife is so stunned, she can’t begin to process what this command means, let alone form a response. And then the striking bits of dialogue: “It smells like a bakery,” says the enraged Ann, entering a bakery. “Doesn’t it smell like a bakery?” (Words simply acting as vehicles for some red-alarm anxiety.) And Ann: “Yes, we’re the parents. You’re pretty smart for a baker.” Yeesh! You feel like you’re right there with Ann. (Also, I love the husband looking at the doctor’s extended hand, as if he has forgotten the steps involved in hand-shaking, or as if he just can’t get back into the give-and-take of social behavior. That pause and that look are worth a thousand words. And I love the subtext in the dialogue: “Is this a coma?” “Well,” said the doctor, “I don’t want to call it a coma.” As if that’s an answer! Doctors. Good grief.)

-Francine Prose, in her recent book-length study of great fiction, observes that a good liar includes just one or two bracing details where necessary. That seems to be the point of noting the baker’s “thick neck”—a neck that will again make an appearance at the end of the story, when strong emotions are coloring everything. I also love the stars on the child’s cake—a nod to the celestial, to the cosmic—and to the way that stars, actual stars, pop up at the end of the story, when Ann returns to have her final confrontation with the baker. (And I wonder if Lorrie Moore’s “Dance in America”—another famous “dying child” story with an eye on multiple planets—grew, in part, as a response to “A Small, Good Thing.”)

-Carver wrote so that “nothing gets slurred.” You can spend “an evening just inserting and reinserting commas.” When the work is lazy or colored by uncontrolled personal emotions, the reader gets tired and lets his focus drop. Carver didn’t want that. Also, he wanted to endow small things—a neck, a buzzing, in the background--with great feeling. (And that’s because we project our feelings onto the world around us, all the time, in actual life.) The problem of “Good Thing” grows out of the gruff baker’s antisocial tendencies—and they are there, in the first paragraph. The failure to comment or even make eye contact as Ann does her chit-chat. Who can predict that the baker’s very muted rudeness will explode in the way it explodes? This is not a story to read if you have children. It’s not a story to read if you want to sleep well tonight. You have been warned.

P.S. It seems to me that Weiner takes a great deal from John Cheever, as well. Specifically, Weiner has a fondness for Cheever’s quietly fantastical side. You see Cheever flirting with the supernatural in “The Swimmer,” or when “Diana” rises “from the sea.” I detect that particular Cheever-esque mischievousness in Weiner’s “Waterloo,” when Bert returns from the dead to serenade Don. “The moon belongs to everyone…..The best things in life are free….”