R. Carver

About the Author

R. Carver writes a tightly defined kind of fiction for Portal Avalon: the long, almost domestic study of a marriage that has built a second life inside the first. The pieces are short, formally restrained, and notably uninterested in melodrama. The discovery scenes that other writers use as climaxes Carver places near the opening, then spends the rest of the story on the architecture — the cash payments, the duplicate keys, the small editings of what gets said over dinner.

The Carver byline is a pen name. The work is built from observation of contemporary upper-middle-class domestic life and from a sustained interest in the literature of marital concealment — from Updike and Cheever to the contemporary autobiographical novel. The recurring concern is not whether the marriage will survive the affair but what kind of self the secret produces in the person carrying it. Carver’s protagonists are not punished for what they do; they are read with the careful, almost forensic attention that the secret was designed to deflect.

Two stories have appeared under this byline so far, both in the Betrayal & Secrets category. They are designed to read as companions; one shows the architecture from inside the marriage that does not yet know, the other from inside the marriage that has just learned. Future work will extend the line into the corporate-marriage register.

R. Carver

❖ Marital Concealment

The long-running architecture of an affair, the duplicate life, the small daily editings of what gets said.

❖ Domestic Realism

Upper-middle-class interiors, the carefully maintained surface and the unaccounted forty minutes underneath.

❖ Quiet Discovery

The discovery scene as an opening rather than a climax; what the reader sees after the wife opens the message.