Despite the odd fact that Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway have both been tagged with the term "realistic writer," both write as if they are more concerned with style and form than any kind of fidelity to experience as actually lived by living, breathing people. The fact that they foregrounded technique in this way essentially precluded them from being successful at fooling the reader into believing the reality of their stories. Where Sherwood Anderson often concealed his writing in the voices of his characters, Hemingway's story structure and the sentences he used often competed for attention with his characters. His stories are as much about how he tells them as what he tells the reader. And while Raymond Carver certainly isn't the only writer to carry on Hemingway's mode of telling stories, his name remains a popular byword for a certain kind of fiction.

I suspect both writers would squirm away from the majority of writing passed off under their names, with its formulaic adherence to The House Rules of the American Short Story.  The kind of writing they're often associated with usually has pleasant characters and mostly smooth writing that only makes itself present in the odd lyrical passage.  This writing harkens back to Hemingway or Carver the way the Olive Garden harkens back to an authentic Italian bistro. These books are well written and words like "gorgeous" and "essential" have been used to describe them. Dull as ditch water, I suppose, would not make great dust jacket copy.

There has suddenly resurfaced, I suspect in reaction to this kind of writing, the wild and jagged fiction of the 1970s, without the academic luggage of meta anything or any evidence of the Stetson pointed shadow of Donald Barthleme. While unrealistic fiction continued to exist in the 1980s, realism was king.  Lydia Davis and Diane Williams both published books in the same decade that saw Ethan Canin's The Emperor of the Air. But now there seems to be something going on. Hardly a literary movement, but something unified enough that it warrants Vince Pissaro in Harper's declaring yet another short story renaissance. These writers don't seem to hang out together much, last summer's issue of Conjunctions, "The State of the Art: Fiction," not withstanding. They seem mostly united by a distaste for the clean, well-wrought realistic story.

Which finally brings me to Kevin Canty. While his books bare the tell-tale jacket flap names of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Conner,  Honeymoon and other stories opens, inexplicably, with a monologue from the point of view of Godzilla, written, first person, from the point of view of a giant, bipedal lizard. This book only superficially resembles his first one, A Stranger in this World, a collection of realistic stories in the Hemingway mode. The stories are often uncomfortable in the way that overhearing intimate details about strangers is uncomfortable and everything that happens in this book could actually happen, maybe actually did happen.