Carver seems to experiment with omitting as much as possible from his stories. How much can you leave out without before the tension breaks and only a seemingly random series of events remains? A lot, it seems as the reader’s imagination is gladly prepared to fill the gaps. Almost all of Carver’s minimalistic stories you sense that something serious is going on, just below the surface. In many cases, what the real conflict is, is not resolved within the space of the story, which is a bit unsatisfying. In other cases, like in the best one of the collection ‘So much water so close to home’, this lack of a solution is precisely the strength of the story.