A Summary and Analysis of Raymond Carver’s ‘Popular Mechanics’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Popular Mechanics’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories, but although it is sometimes known by the alternative title ‘Little Things’, there is nothing ‘little’ about this tale of filial breakdown and domestic unhappiness.

The story is easy enough to summarise: it concerns a husband who is packing his bags ready to leave his wife, after they have come to the mutual decision that their relationship is over. But they end up fighting over which of them should keep custody of their baby.

But summarising a Raymond Carver story is only the beginning. To understand the story’s many layers of irony and meaning, we need to look more closely at the language. First, though, it might be worth thinking in a little more detail about even what happens in this very short tale.

Summary

The story begins with the third-person narrator telling us that the snow is melting into dirty water, and it is getting dark outside. These details act as foreshadowing for the dark, brutal conflict between the husband and wife (although the narrator never formally identifies them as married).

The husband is in the bedroom, packing up his clothes, when his wife comes to the door (note that she doesn’t come into the room: significantly, she remains on the threshold, as if no longer able or willing to share the marital bedroom with him).

She tells him she’s glad he’s leaving, but he doesn’t respond. He just continues to pack his things. She bursts into tears and notices the picture of their baby on the bed, picking it up. They look at each other before she turns and goes back into the living room, carrying the baby photo with her.

The husband calls for her to bring it back, but she responds by telling him to finish packing and to leave. Once he has finished packing, he goes into the living room and she stands holding their baby. Once again, she is on the threshold: she stands in the doorway of their little kitchen, as if once again unable to share the same room with her estranged husband.

He tells her he wants their baby, but she tells him he’s crazy for making that demand, refusing him outright. The baby begins to cry, and when the husband steps towards them, the wife retreats into the kitchen. She tries to hold the baby in the corner of the room, out of his reach, but the husband reaches across and grabs the baby.

The baby is now screaming his head off as his parents struggle for possession of him. Their tussle over the baby only succeeds in knocking over a flowerpot (significantly breaking a part of their marital home representing new life and growth?) as the husband pushes his wife against the wall to try to get her to relinquish her grip on their baby.

Eventually, the husband gets his wife to let go of the baby, and she screams as she loses hold of him. She grabs for the baby’s other arm but the husband refuses to let go. As he feels the baby slipping from his grasp, he pulls back. The narrator tells us that the ‘issue was decided’ in ‘this manner’.

Analysis

‘Popular Mechanics’ ends on an ambiguous note, with Carver’s masterly use of an almost bland bureaucratic turn of phrase (‘manner’, ‘issue’, ‘decided’) belying the possibly dark fate that befalls the baby (remember that the flowerpot has already been knocked over: can these parents be trusted to look after a small, living thing?).

Of course, it’s possible that the baby is merely wrested from the wife’s grasp and the husband leaves with him; or that the wife wins their tussle and the baby remains with her while the husband leaves alone. The point of Carver’s story is that we aren’t privy to the eventual fate of the characters, including the baby; as with many modern short stories from Chekhov and modernism onwards, there is ‘more room for the reader’ left in the story, so we are responsible for whatever (speculative) response we have to the story’s ending.

But at the same time, this may be to ask the wrong kinds of questions. What matters is not what may or may not have happened after the story ended, but what happened in the story itself. The conflict between the two parents – both unnamed, as is their baby, as if they are meant to be mere ciphers or types rather than individual characters – is the locus or site of the story’s meaning, not what they end up doing (or not doing) to their child.

The title

The title of Carver’s story tells a story of its own. For what title should we give to this little narrative? ‘Popular Mechanics’ is the best-known one, but it was not the original title: when it was published in a 1977 collection of his stories, Carver initially gave it the title ‘Mine’, a single word which is ambiguously poised between belonging to the husband and to the wife. Or, to put it another way, we cannot (aptly enough) be sure whose word ‘Mine’ is.

When the story was republished in Carver’s volume of selected stories, Where I’m Calling From, it carried the title ‘Little Things’. This choice of title (or retitling) is ambiguous: does it trivialise the events of the story, or is it a reference to those ‘little things’ or objects – from the window in the opening paragraph, to the ‘little kitchen’ in the couple’s home, to the flowerpot and even the baby himself – which frame and inhabit the dysfunctional couple’s life?

But the most famous title, ‘Popular Mechanics’ – given to the story when it was republished in a 1981 collection – is the richest and most ironic of them all. It’s the title of a well-known American magazine focused on domestic and technological topics, such as cars and DIY; the story’s domestic setting immediately gives it a frisson of relevance.

But ‘popular’ means literally ‘of the people’, so Carver’s story is concerned not with the mechanics of ‘things’ (little or otherwise) but the mechanical song-and-dance performed by the people in the story: the husband, the wife, and the baby.

Final thoughts

The fundamental ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ of Carver’s story, then, might be summarised as follows: selfishness leads people to want things – even another human being, such as their own child – not out of an altruistic or loving need but because they merely want to deprive someone else of those things (or that child).

The parents in ‘Popular Mechanics’ perfectly represent this selfish spite. Whilst their baby may well have been born of a love they once shared, now that baby is merely a pawn or object to be fought over. What matters to the husband is not that he has the baby but that he prevents his wife from having him (or ‘it’: note the shift in pronouns the narrator uses to describe the baby).

Carver brilliantly shows the parents’ dehumanising of the baby to the level of a ‘thing’ through having the child first appear in the story as a literal thing: as a representation in a photograph, which the wife spots on the bed. The husband is presumably planning to take it with him as a reminder of the baby he was intending to leave behind with its mother. But when he sees the wife’s possessiveness over their child, he decides he wants to take the baby away from her.