Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories by Raymond Carver (review)

Reviews Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories by Raymond Carver. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. 391 pages, $19.95.) We were meeting on a patio in morning sunlight, on August 3, 1988, in Aspen, a creative writing class. “I see in the paper this morning,” one of them said, “where your friend is dead.” He was talking about the New York Times. Ray was dead at the age of fifty, the saw-filer’s son from Yakima, leaving us the example of his will to stay honest and compassionate, both in his art and in his conduct while dying. The best of Raymond Carver’s fictions (I include his autobiographical essays and many of the deceptively complex narrative poems he wrote in the last few years) are among the most well-made (delicately torqued) and emo­ tionally accurate ever written by an American. Perhaps because his stories are so masterfully simple in their surface negotiations (although his intentions were almost always resonatingly complex and ironic, his indirect so-called “minimalist” techniques played out with such a sure off-hand quality, his meanings originating from the play of tension between disjunctions) they have sometimes been taken as primarily focused on some school-room imitation of the disconnections and emotional distances encountered in various modernist suburban situations, and thus superficial and frigid themselves, in their implica­ tions. It is a nonsensical misreading. The stories in this collection concern themselves with the fragile courage of our kind as we go about the difficult and frightening over-and-over business of naming and renaming our breaking faithless redoubling selves, recognition and reversal after recognition and reversal as we continually go on attempting reconnection to the point of things. Any useful critics or sensible readers look­ ing to search out the true helpfulness of a story-teller would focus their atten­ tions on the ways these stories work on our behalf, which is to say encourage us in our efforts to be whole and humane amid our confusions, somehow showing the way. This collection is a reasonably complete doorway into Raymond Carver’s way of doing art, from the best of his beginning work (“The Student’s Wife”) to the very last story he published, which by some strange fated coincidence concerned itself with the death of Chekhov with whom Carver identified more and more. That story is called “The Errand,” and I take it to be one of his masterworks, along with “Cathedral” and “A Small, Good Thing.” They were coming with increasing frequency at the end, and it is our grievous loss that we shall have no more of them. 64 Western American Literature For the time being this collection can be taken as representative of what we have been given by an American master. It is deeply autobiographical and out of our own lives;it is courageous and generous in itswillingness to confront our slippery troubles; it suggests to us that we must always stay compassionate, by which I mean civilized. WILLIAM KITTREDGE University of Montana Born Brothers. By Larry Woiwode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. 611 pages, $18.95.) Whereas Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) is akin to such other western family chronicle novels as Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Frederick Manfred’s Green Earth (all three are multigenerational in scope and the cardinal event in all three is the death of the mother), Born Brothers is more like Willa Cather’sMy Antonia in that it is an attempt by a first-person narrator to reclaim the memory of a past he has shared with a person who has been his emotional and spiritual complement, almost (for Woiwode) his twin. Though Beyond the Bedroom Wall isepisodic, it has a power gained by accretion of incident. Born Brothers is, if anything, even more episodic, yet it is a tighter novel, both structurally and thematically. Whether it is a better novel will depend perhaps on what expectations readers bring to it from the earlier book. Born Brothers is told from the point of view of Charles Neumiller (the younger) as he recalls the events of his childhood, adolescence, and manhood, events...