I hadn't read Raymond Carver since I was in my twenties, probably, maybe not since I was in college, and now I'm in my forties and I just watched Birdman and thought to myself, "I need to reread Carver. I need to see what Carver is like when you're in your forties." So I read this one, and I'm gonna read Cathedral at some point in the near future. But reading this in my forties, I realize how little I understood in my twenties about anything and how little I understand, even in my forties, about the lives of most people who live in my country. I don't understand ninety-nine percent of what most Americans are doing.

So there's stuff in Carver I understand better now and there's stuff I still don't understand. And I'm like, "Why do we teach these stories about working-class and middle-class marriages in the Carter/Reagan era to nineteen-year-olds in college?" Like, what do nineteen-year-olds in an Introduction to Literature classes get out of Carver? The whole sentiment, the experiences, the subject matter, it's all so damned middle-aged. But my wife said, "It's because of subtext," and that made sense, Carver is really great at subtext and that's something nineteen-year-old students in Intro to Literature need to understand.

Another thing: I kept getting the names of the characters confused.