Professor White's list

If you've read one of his stories, you've pretty much read them all. I'd say he's a Cheever/Capote-wanna-be and doesn't really have a finished writing style of his own. I went through half of the book, forcing myself through every bloody story and I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm reading the same piece over and over again (very few exceptions). I don't know what I dislike most about his work: the fact that he has the same characters in pretty much every story (the needy whiny wife, the detached taciturn and invariably half-drunk husband - some thing or other with a spill of water - and some almost hallucinatory third party whose development as character was arrested mid-way), the ever prevalent but too forced and blatant feeling of some silent life-shattering drama going on, the total predictability of characters, the "writing trick" of repetition that he's employed and is abusing in every other paragraph (be it repetition as part of a dialogue or of the plot), the lack of any diversity whatsoever or his gross failure to come up with a decent dialogue. Even his characters' speech mannerisms are the same throughout the stories, which is only to show that his imagination is insufficient enough to build distinct characters. Also his awkward particularity with names in every story is downright annoying. He can write well enough to give the illusion that he's a good writer, but if you look into his stories, there's not much going on. He's good at mimicking all right - in a lot of his stories ("What's in Alaska" is a good example) I get the feeling that he's got no idea what he's talking about; it seems like he's faking experience and competence when discussing certain things. It could ring true to somebody who's not acquainted with those topics, but that doesn't change the fact that nonetheless it's all just balderdash. Another thing I realized is that he's really bad at creating some sense of time in his stories, be it minutes or years, so for the most part his characters hang in a space-time vacuum. Last but not least, it looks like they also lack the ability to do more than one thing at a time: "he thought, then he drank, then he walked, then he sat, then he drank, then he said" is what goes on most of the time. While Capote and Cheever manage to create masterpieces without explicitly talking about the horrible drama that engulfs their characters, Carver is like a toddler trying to create the same effect. "Bland" isn't the right word, but first word that comes to mind.