Selected Stories
By Raymond Carver
Published by Vintage Contemporaries, New York
As a creative writing student, it is hard to miss Raymond Carver. [break]His name crops up frequently during workshops, discussions, and even the shortest of short breaks. Carver has become the quintessential short-story writer that workshop students hero-worship, attempt to emulate, and failing which, worship some more.
Where I’m Calling From is a compilation of some of Carver’s best works. They are short stories he selected, as per his interviews, on the basis of having liked them enough to have them reprinted. The collection includes controversial pieces liberally edited by Gordon Lish (then editor at Esquire), some versions of which Carver restored, and other stories produced after he broke away from Lish’s ruthless editorial hold.
Carver is categorized as a minimalist writer, a writer of modern contemporary fiction that revolves around issues of American domestic life, a portrayer of the working class. His stories are not about big things but rather the minutiae of moments: Moments that create cracks in a character’s life, the thin thread of these cracks running throughout the stories, gathering momentum until the end when a change, however diminutive, occurs in the character or situation. But despite Carver’s characters ranging from the struggling and insensitive to plain losers, he is able to preserve that quality of human caring which redeems them.“Cathedral,” considered as a Carver masterpiece and included in Where I’m Calling From, starts out with a nameless “I” narrator who does not look forward to meeting his wife’s blind friend. The narrator verges on the insensitive and politically incorrect person who makes assumptions about the blind visitor. But when the visitor does arrive, we are given moments, intense and fragile ones, such as the scene when they sit down to eat:
We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate.
Such moments of silent intensity, understanding, and action shift the paradigm of the story until the narrator is left alone with the visitor, and they end up watching a TV show about cathedrals. The narrator fumbles, trying to describe a cathedral to the blind man, and finally accedes by offering to draw one with him. The climax is quite something here; it is a deeply internal change in the narrator, a change that leaves a profound impression on the reader.
Other stories such as “Fat,” “Why don’t you dance?” and “What we talk about when we talk about love” have interesting narrative arcs that range from shifts in perspectives to shifts in meanings of specific words. Carver is very spare with the words he uses, but the precision with which he uses them recreates the meaning of the story through repetition of specific words. For instance, in “Vitamins,” vitamins become a symbol of everything the characters hoped life would become for them; in “Alaska,” the pair of mundane shoes evolves into a symbol for the strain that appears in the protagonist’s marriage. The evolution of meaning in words through repetitions, and Carver’s use of details such as a pet peacock, plaster-of-Paris teeth, and ugly baby in “Feathers” give the stories a dimension that makes for real, specific, and grounded. The details might be bizarre, but they never seem out of place in Carver’s stories; they are puzzle pieces that develop and tauten the tension between characters, giving the stories a subliminal quality.
“Where I’m Calling From,” the title story, first published in the New Yorker when Carver was at the height of his literary career, is a narrative account of two people who meet at an alcohol rehabilitation facility. Critics have often used it to draw parallels with Carver’s own struggle with alcoholism. His stories have a lot of drinking in them, sometimes as characteristic habits and sometimes as pivotal points. But Where I’m Calling From goes beyond the surface to invade the mind of a storyteller, and how it influences the listener, the unspoken understanding about the struggle and inability of two alcoholics to give up their addictions even though nearly everything and everyone in their lives have slipped away.
The final story in the collection is “Errand,” as homage to Anton Chekhov, whom Carver hero-worshipped. Carver borrowed chunks from Henri Troyat’s Chekhov, a biography of the Russian writer, and boldly built the story around the final hours of Chekhov. Dialogues, sentences, and events, such as the champagne drinking before Chekhov breathed his last, are documented as real. However, Carver hones into the perspectives of Olga Knipper (Chekhov’s wife) and a fictional waiter, grounding the story on the champagne cork that has fallen on the carpet between their feet. Carver reimagines the situation of those hours, and skillfully ends the story about Chekhov in the way Chekhov ended those he himself wrote.
The stories in Where I’m Calling From are arranged chronologically. The earlier versions are leaner for Lish’s editing and more minimalist. The latter ones are expansive and experimental in comparison, especially those included in the “New Stories” section. The separate stories are remarkable in many ways, particularly for craft and storytelling methods. They never fail to astound the reader even after having read them several times.
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