The writer who gets more out of minimal dialog that anyone other than Carver

Dorothy Parker's story Big Blonde is in some ways truly a 1930s period piece -  speakeasies like "Jimmy's," men taking the train to Utica, mailing postcards home from the road, a time of "booze" and tiny mid-town apartments and nights out "on the town" - and in other ways it could sadly be contemporary, marriages soaked in alcohol, the loneliness of a woman who makes a terrible choice in a husband, who's always expected by the men show knows to be a "good sport" and to stop "crabbing" (the language seems antique but the sensibilities, not). The big blonde of the title is Hazel Morse, marries I guy who drinks a lot a makes her laugh, a marriage doomed from the start, ending in her descent into alcohol in a misguided attempt to keep her mood up for him, he leaves her in a poignant scene in which she asks him to have one more drink w/ her - mud in your eye, they toast - and then she has a series of men friends, none of whom she especially cares for, most of whom have a wife back in Utica or wherever, and as she gets deeper into depression she takes the train to Jersey - a very dismal little portrait of Newark - where she can legally sleeping pills and she tries to kill herself. She's an American Bovary, in some ways - though she's more the victim that Emma is - and altogether it's just a very sorrowful if completely credible portrait of a life heading nowhere, without hope. Parker gets more effect out of minimal dialogue that any writer I can think of other than Carver. The last line of the story, I think, is something like, "yeah, sure," and in the context - Hazel rousing from a near-fatal dose of tablets and coddled by her cleaning lady (paid for by one of her men friends) - is an eloquent conclusion as yes I will yes.