Customer Reviews

Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

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Try to rate a Carver short stories collection is like trying to rate your father actions. You just can't judge him, you only can stare at him. You can even try to understand him, but you don't really have to. There is something beautiful and small hidden in every adjective, every description, every end of a story. Raymond Carver's love for human actions is everywhere in his writing. He puts big attention in little details, uncovering the small moments in every relationationship. You and your wife. Your wife and her friends. Tons of couples having dinner with other couples. Every little thing is a whole world for Carver.

This book comes with four new stories recently discovered, a couple of great essays (the great "My father's life"), early stories, introductions, books reviews and a small uncomppleted fragment of a novel. Definitively, it's Carver for friends. If you are not familiar with his books, you should start with his most famous books, as "What we talk abgout when we talk about love", or his first collection of stories, "Will you please be quiet, please?". Any other case, you are welcome to enter this house.

Call If You Need Me is a collection of writings by Raymond Carver that wouldn't fit into any of his many short story collections. This anthology has five previously unpublished stories as well as a smattering of essays, notes and book reviews. I enjoyed the stories, of the other writing there were hits and misses - the introductions and the book reviews for example were there merely for the sake completeness and don't really serve much of a purpose. Recommended for the short stories.

I am excited that there are "new" stories by Raymond Carver. "Call If You Need Me" and "Kindling" are among his best. The rest of the book is disappointing to me: I didn't realize that this would just be the new stories tacked on to NO HEROICS, PLEASE. Essentially, serious readers of Carver's work are being asked to buy the same book twice. "Call If You Need Me" can be found in this year's O. Henry anthology, and "Kindling" can be found in the current edition of Best American Short Stories. The other new stories, I guess, can be found in past issues of Esquire magazine. If the new stories were instead collected in some other way - say, in a slim volume alone, or with some unpublished work by other worthy writers, then I wouldn't be as disappointed. I was expecting a new book altogether -- not just new pages. Still, these stories need to be read. NO HEROICS, PLEASE is a book worth owning, too. If you don't already own it, then I recommend this title. Otherwise, find the new stories elsewhere.

I guess it was bound to happen one day--Carver died when I was in college, when I was still a young writer who was finding inspiration from his work. I didn't really mean to, but I most likely built a kind of Carver mythology in my head and made the mistake of taking my reverence for his writing as a reason to also revere the man as a wise soul. Perhaps it was also knowing the story of the Lish-Carver split, of a writer who broke free from the confines of an editor who had helped bring him to notoriety so that he could write according to his own vision and not the vision of another, that also made Carver a kind of iconic figure in my developing artistic sensibility.

Over time, of course, I found the less lustrous moments of Carver's work and found myself more in respect than awe. In rereading his stories, I found the gears behind the magic, saw his process of moving narrative and even allowed myself to note what stories of his I didn't like. I consider this a closer affection for Carver's work than when I was in awe of it, for it allowed me to touch the humanity of Carver's art, which I find a more solid basis for connection than reverence and idolatry. Note that I have made no mention of Carver's poetry--this is because I simply could never find myself appreciating much of it, and this is another aspect of my respect for Carver. In order to truly embrace something and hold it dear, we also need to know what's wrong with it.

So I was of course intrigued to read Carver stories that had never come to light before, and of late I have been finding myself more and more interested in the thinking processes of artists, so I wanted to read the nonfiction too, not only for insight on his own writing but in the writing of others.

The five uncollected stories here are all quite wonderful and confirm the direction of Carver's work--the compassionate insight into characters struggling to make themselves better, though that improvement is not always in the direction they initially foresee. We of course see a lot of couples in flux, even on the verge of breaking up as their best option. Among these, I think the strongest of them is the title story, for it combines the essence of what has always Carver's work so powerful--a touch of magic rooted squarely in the mundane. I would rather not give away the magical moment here, but Carver does it with skillful handling so that it is a moment as natural as any other, and his handling of characters is as thorough and as kind as ever.

The five essays included here are also quite wonderful. "On Writing" and his essay on John Gardner are excellent treatises on the art of writing, done of course in a rather unobtrusive style that focuses on what Carver himself did rather than demand certain efforts from others. My wife was also quite taken with "Fires," and how Carver talks about writing (or not writing) while having children. The early stories, which are next included, are interesting but not thoroughly engaging (though, in "The Hair," it is quite funny to see Carver parodying Hemingway), but as I got through these, and of course into Carver's book reviews and commentaries, I started to get a sense of a stilted man, who had decided, through circumstance or philosophy, that writing worked best under certain circumstances. This became quite clear in his comments on Donald Barthelme and his introduction to American Short Story Masterpieces.

Perhaps Carver was still reeling at the time of these with his split from Gordon Lish, for Carver seems to insist in these works on a style of writing that is very much different from the school of writing that was (and probably is) promoted heavily by Gordon Lish, something that Carver was directed towards (willingly or unwillingly) by Lish when it came to putting together his early collections. In his review of Barthelme's Great Days, he talks about his admiration of the Donald's work, which is good to see, but he also goes on a tirade against those who imitate Barthelme's work in writing programs (a criticism that, ironically, could now be applied to many students in college writing programs who now flatly imitate Carver). In the introduction to American Short Story Masterpieces, Carver insists even more directly on fiction that exhibits the lives of "grown-up men and women engaged in the ordinary but sometimes remarkable business of living and, like ourselves, in full awareness of their mortality."

This, of course, is a good summary of Carver's aesthetic, but he seems to insist in this introduction that it is the best kind of writing, and this seems to undermine the compassionate Carver, one who might accept differences in others, for these differences seem to be okay only if they apply exclusively to this aesthetic.

Carver's shortcomings become best known through his introduction to Best American Short Stories, 1986, something I had read long ago soon after the volume had come out but hadn't revisited until reading this collection. Carver clearly made some good choices (Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel), but there is a certain amount of nepotism among his choices--Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Tess Gallagher. That the first two were close friends, the last a significant other, tainted those choices for me (also the included fact that some of the selections were hand-picked by Carver and not provided by series editor Shannon Ravenel) now that I knew more about Raymond Carver the man than I did in the late 80's when I first picked up that book.

But these kinds of revelations are bound to happen and, let's face it, necessary. But was this the point of this collection? From Tess Gallagher's introduction, I think not. I am no longer in awe of Carver, and haven't been for a long time, and I still respect his work quite highly, and frankly it is good to see some chinks in the armor and evidence of his own weaknesses, but I kind of doubt that the collection was meant to leave me feeling this way.

I just re-read "Kindling" for the umpteenth time, and once again I had to take a deep breath of awe afterwards. I think it's my favorite Carver story. "What Would Like to See?" is good also. They're all good. Even his early work sings with that grand Carver simplicity. But "Kindling" is outstanding. If you buy this book solely for that you're getting much more than your money's worth.