The traditional account of the first meeting between Jay McInerney and Raymond Carver goes something like this: on the afternoon of 9 December 1980 McInerney was in his Greenwich Village apartment in New Yo1rk City when he received an unexpected phone call from his best friend Gary Fisketjon. Fisketjon, an assistant editor at Random House, had just finished a lunch meeting with Carver and Gordon Lish. In lieu of a tour guide, he told McInerney that he was sending Carver to his home for the afternoon before a scheduled reading at Columbia University later that evening. McInerney, at the time an aspiring writer and Carver admirer, thinking this was some kind of practical joke, immediately hung up the phone. Fisketjon had to re-dial and insist that Carver really was on his way. Moments later, it seemed, there was a knock on his door and Carver's lumbering frame shadowed the threshold. The two men spent the afternoon taking cocaine together and talking about writing. Later Fisketjon turned up and sped Carver uptown via the subway just in time for the reading. Carver and McInerney parted that evening, so the story goes, with Carver entreating McInerney to leave the financial and creative drain of New York City and move to Syracuse to study on the creative writing programme with him.

To fully understand the significance of this event for McInerney it is worth revisiting, for a moment, his undergraduate years at Williams College. Five years earlier McInerney was studying for a philosophy major (hoping to become a writer after he graduated) and came across Carver's collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? He describes the initial experience of reading Carver as ‘a bolt out of the blue’ that illuminated the reality he saw around him. ‘Suddenly this very new language, this wonderful new idiom. It's the world as you always suspected, but you never realised it was until you read the book’, he told Sam Halpert in an interview. McInerney's reaction was, as I’ll argue later, remarkably similar to both Murakami and Vlautin's initial experience of reading Carver, and adds weight to the idea that Carver's fiction reveals or sheds light on a particular type of reality that, up to that point, exceeds conceptual mapping.