Caviar critique

T.C. Boyle’s Caviar is an interesting story featuring a fisherman, his wife and the surrogate mother of their child. The way the story is written it sounds like the fisherman is telling the story to a friend over beers. He continuously goes off topic, talking about a tangent thought or event and bring it back with “anyway,” as if he was speaking and this was just one of his habits. It does however, allow for a great deal of detail and exposition to be given without completely ruining the flow of the story. He can talk about an affair he had years ago, or what kind of fish he would reel in during a season and then bring it back to the main story about the baby.

I did find it interesting how the narrator not going to college became a big part of his identity. The first sentence of the story states he didn’t go to college, as if that detail is the first thing the audience should know about him. Not what he does or where he lives, but the fact that he didn’t go to college is the thing that people should know “right off.” And in the end it’s the reason Wendy leaves him, because she would rather be with a doctor than a fisherman that didn’t go to college. Maybe this shows that the narrator feels that if he did go to college he would have gotten Wendy or not inherited his father’s life. That if he did his life would be better in some part.