Final thoughts on Will You Please be Quiet, Please?

I love Raymond Carver when he's at the top of his game, but I don't always love Raymond Carver (apropos of my IQ test today, I feel like a Venn Diagram would be useful here.) I finished his first short story collection and it was wobbly at times. When the stories didn't work, I was reading them with half a mind to what the odd, melancholy kathunk of an ending would be. Like at the end of "The Student's Wife" where the woman who has spent the night trying to get her husband to entertain her insomnia by talking to her about past vacations and favorite things gets down on her knees and prays to God for help. Or in "How About This?" when a couple attempts to relocate to her father's cabin in the woods only to find it too primitive and the wife says "We just have to love each other."

The stories I liked best were:

• "Fat": a waitress dwells on the experience of serving an unusually zaftig diner and decides "My life is going to change. I feel it."
• "What's in Alaska?": an evening of trying out the neighbor's new bong gets the carpet pulled out on the reader when they learn what the husband already knows (I think-these Carver characters and their passivity)
• "Nobody Said Anything": a young boy skips school to go fishing. Meanwhile, he's only vaguely aware of his parents' marriage violently disintegrating in the background. And he brings home a giant fish that's actually a snake. 
• "Night School": a young divorced man living with his parents meets two hard older dames at a bar and ends up walking with them in search of a car so they can play surprise visit with their literacy class instructor.
• "Put Yourself in My Shoes": a wife drags her reluctant writer husband to drop in unannounced on the couple whose house they rented briefly at Christmas time. Hilarious awkwardness ensues. So, did they own a cat and use their linens or not? 
• "Jerry and Molly and Sam": I should hate this cheating bastard for dumping his kids' dog in a strange neighborhood but he's somehow both too pathetic and relatable for me to successfully pull it off.