Vitamins by Raymond Carver

Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography.

This is far from Raymond Carver at his best. In fact, Vitamins might be my least favorite Carver story I have come across recently and a big part of that is its length. Carver usually excels at short, tightly focused narratives, but this one feels oddly loose and meandering. Maybe that aimlessness is intentional, but for me it doesn’t quite land, and the story really drags.

That being said, the opening paragraphs are terrific in that unmistakable Carver way. We are quickly dropped into the narrator’s simmering frustration with his girlfriend Patti, who works a “nothing job” selling vitamins door to door. It’s a tough, demoralizing gig and Patti’s self-worth clearly takes a hit because of it. Both characters are heavy drinkers (no surprise there since alcoholism is practically a recurring character in Carver’s fiction), and the narrator soon develops a crush on Donna, Patti’s coworker. He’s not exactly a charming or sympathetic figure.

What really took me out of the story, though, was the use of explicit racial stereotypes. There’s a scene where the narrator takes Donna to a Black bar, and Black characters are referred to using slurs ("spades"). One character in particular, Nelson, is depicted as a sexually aggressive pimp, which was off-putting to say the least. I’m not entirely sure what Carver wants us to take away from this section or from the story as a whole.

Still, Vitamins does function as a slice-of-life snapshot of a pretty wretched narrator with a faint hint of redemption near the end (though Patti can do so much better). If you are already a dedicated Carver fan, it’s probably worth reading for completion’s sake. But if you’re new to his work, there are plenty of better stories in his catalogue I would recommend reaching for first.