They cannot leave their chairs but must sit silently, fixed into anxiety. Love,'' two couples chat somewhat aimlessly about the vagaries of love until their talk leads to an atmosphere of brooding reflectiveness. In a perhaps richer story, ''What We Talk About When We Talk About The story strikes at the nerves, creating ripples of anxiety. Repeats the vulgarities several customers have been making about his wife's exposed flesh. In a brilliant story from an earlier collection, ''They're Not Your Husband,'' a man distraught over losing his job goes to the restaurant where his wife works as a waitress and, out of some unprobed need for self-humiliation, It's that his abrupt rhythms and compressions come to be utterly decisive. In that respect, he's quite self-effacing. It's not that he imposes moral or political judgments He is moving toward a greater ease of manner and generosity of feeling but in most of his work it's his own presence, the hard grip of his will, that is the strongest force. In his newest collection of stories, ''Cathedral,'' there are a few that suggest Carver has been mostly a writer of strong but limited effects - the sort of writer who shapes and twists his material to a high point of stylization. The familiar controls guiding daily life fall apart panic takes over. Familiar enough on the surface, these stories leave one with tremors that resemble the start of a breakdown. His actions skid across the troubles of daily life and then, through some eerie turn of chance or perhaps a darkerĬause, collapse into failed marriages and broken lives. His characters, plebeian loners struggling for speech, now and then find work as factory hands and waitresses. His settings are American towns, semi-industrial and oftenĭepressed. Raymond Carver, an American writer now in his mid-40's, has been writing stories for some years that, on a smaller emotional scale, create similar effects. How they do this only a very good art criticĬan explain, but that it happens everyone who looks at pictures must know. Maurice Utrillo paints European streets that narrow into enigmatic space and Edward Hopper American houses that seem laden with disquiet.

THERE are artists who reach the strange by staying with the ordinary. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy IRVING HOWE Irving Howe's latest book is ''A Margin of Hope'' September 11, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

Raymond carver's short story cathedral