Stéphane Michaka, SCISSORS

An author's note tells us that Stéphane Michaka's third novel (translated from the French by John Cullen) is only "loosely based" on Raymond Carver's life, but that's a little hard to swallow: no meaningful element of plot or theme has been invented. Nor does Michaka have any special insight into Carver's alcoholism, his difficult family life, or his ambiguous relationship with Gordon Lish, the editor who made Carver famous by radically reshaping his stories in ways Carver wasn't always comfortable with. For some reason, though the Carver equivalent is still named Raymond, the Lish equivalent is named Douglas, while Carver's first wife Maryann becomes Marianne and his second wife, Tess Gallagher, becomes Joanne. Yet more variant names appear in four stories-within-the-story, works not by Carver but by Michaka's Raymond. Between the translation of Carver into French and the translation of Michaka into English it's hard to say whether the style of these stories is much like Carver, but they're certainly more narrowly autobiographical than most of his work, and weaker. Michaka's style (both in the stories and in the main narrative) is nominally minimalist but so pregnant with melancholy that it's as overwrought as actual purple prose. There's no more real pathos than you would get reading a biography of Carver. Scissors is short enough that you can read it in an afternoon, but unless you know nothing about the subject and would rather find out about it via fiction than non-fiction, it's probably not worth even that much time.