"So Much Water So Close to Home" (1975)

Here's another classic Raymond Carver story with lots of familiar themes and notes. It's instantly recognizable as one of the stories adapted for the movie Short Cuts. As it happens, it's also one of the more extreme examples of Gordon Lish's editing. Carver's original manuscript version is 20 pages in the Library of America edition whereas the version in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is only seven. In the restored-plus version in Where I'm Calling From it's 25 pages. So that makes three versions of the four suburban husbands on a weekend fishing trip who discover the nude corpse of a young woman who has been murdered and dumped. You recall they tie the corpse to a tree and go on fishing and drinking for another day or two, and therein lie all the problems. It's an ingenious premise, a perfect fictional device. The morally occluded fishermen stay a little longer in the long version, but in both cases leave earlier than they had planned. The wife of one of them is the first-person narrator of this story. I think Carver does OK at the cross-gender voice though it's not perfect—cross-gender voices rarely are. This wife is not taking this situation well and her husband does not understand or anyway is defensive. It's serious enough that it seems to threaten their marriage though the ending is ambiguous. I've done a side-by-side a couple times now and for what it's worth came out both ways. The first time I liked Carver's easygoing storytelling style more, but this last time I thought Lish's editing made the points of the story hit harder. It's unfortunate you can't approach each version in a similarly open way. Who knows? Maybe my different preferences are a matter of which one I read first each time. I don't recall. What a problem! The long version spends more time on the wife and her crisis, externalized when she travels 120 miles to attend the young woman's funeral, and really her crisis is the point of the story along with her husband's oblivion. She has an unsettling experience on the way to the funeral, which is handled better in the long version. I can see Lish has turned it into a sort of half-comic anecdote about witless men and their exasperated wives. But the power of this one in concept still basically transcends the confusion of the myriad versions. My suggestion is stick with Where I'm Calling From. But keeping a copy around of What We Talk About is not a bad idea either. Even lamed Carver is still pretty good fiction.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)