Books, Arts & Manners: Campus Cut-Up

Three Thousand Dollars, by David Lipsky (Summit, 201 pp., $18.95)

It was no surprise that the death of Raymond Carver a year ago elicited confessions of his influence from a range of our youngest novelists and short-story writers. As Jay McInerney attested most recently, in The New York Times Book Review, for many writers of his generation, “encountering Carver’s fiction early in the 1970s was a transforming experience . . . perhaps comparable to discovering Hemingway’s sentences in the Twenties.” You might go further and say that among such young writers as have any sense of style at all, a pretty comprehensive division can be seen: between those who fancy themselves experimentalists—mostly pale young women writing pale imitations of Gabriel García Márquez—and their opposites, the realists, the followers of Carver. Among these latter, David Lipsky now emerges as one of the freshest and most appealing.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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Three Thousand Dollars, by David Lipsky (Summit, 201 pp., $18.95)

It was no surprise that the death of Raymond Carver a year ago elicited confessions of his influence from a range of our youngest novelists and short-story writers. As Jay McInerney attested most recently, in The New York Times Book Review, for many writers of his generation, “encountering Carver’s fiction early in the 1970s was a transforming experience . . . perhaps comparable to discovering Hemingway’s sentences in the Twenties.” You might go further and say that among such young writers as have any sense of style at all, a pretty comprehensive division can be seen: between those who fancy themselves experimentalists—mostly pale young women writing pale imitations of Gabriel García Márquez—and their opposites, the realists, the followers of Carver. Among these latter, David Lipsky now emerges as one of the freshest and most appealing.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.