What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

I had never read the original collection of Raymond Carver stories, as edited by Gordon Lish and published in 1981. It propelled Carver to elite literary status as a short story writer and so-called minimalist. It’s not hard to see why this collection was taken as a cultural milestone and literary sensation. These stories hit hard and keep moving. It’s the world of the impoverished uneducated underclass, but the voice is sharp with wit and lively with close observation. I know there’s controversy around Lish’s editing, as Carver later published revisions of some of these stories in Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From, in many ways restorations of what he originally wrote. But this book and these stories all jammed together are so crackling good I’m willing to take it as a successful collaboration and leave it at that. We can see now that Lish was at pains to expunge all sentiment, and that sometimes Carver wanted to write sentimental stories. This very short book captures an exquisitely perfect moment that would not be possible to continue, this minimalism, without high risk of going obvious, arch, and/or empty. In retrospect, Cathedral was the only way forward. But for the moment these 17 stories are gripping, poignant, weird, and compulsively readable. For one thing, they set up a context where “Popular Mechanics” finally actually works. It’s the shortest piece here, a two-pager that is rather obvious taken on its own or in its longer earlier and later versions. Lish has argued he is the author of the voice of Raymond Carver. That’s not entirely true but it’s not entirely wrong either. He may be the author of perhaps the most pungent and perhaps the most heartless shading of Carver’s voice. Carver was reporting in from the front lines of the economic shifts and dislocations that resulted in Reaganomics and a hollowed-out middle class, on the ground watching it happen. Lish is there to throttle back the impulse to compassion. That leaves us with 17 shards of lived experience which ring true, every sentence. Divorce, alcoholism, lost children—they’re all here, showing us what it looks like and feels like in its bewildering reality. I still think Where I’m Calling From is the best place to start with Carver, and Cathedral is a necessary stop. But so is this one, with the long Carver-esque title which Lish picked out of one of the stories, renaming the story (one of the longest and best) and the collection. Carver had wanted to call it Beginners. Make no mistake, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a collaboration between editor and writer—I think that’s the credit Lish wants too. Ultimately a very successful one. Essential.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009)

Carol Sklenicka's biography of poet and short story writer Raymond Carver is very good, packed with research and interviews and inevitably nearly as heartbreaking as some of Carver's stories. It was good to get to the bottom, more or less, of Carver's relationship with Gordon Lish, which is surprising in many ways. It's fair to say Lish is almost wholly responsible for the "minimalist" tag Carver was stuck with by Lish's alarmingly aggressive editing of the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. Carver was generous and deft in circumventing the subsequent problems, but I believe he is still taken as a literary minimalist by many. In typical fashion, he was happy to accept the glory and evolve his writing from there in the limited time he had left. Inevitably, also, as biographies will, Sklenicka reveals the clay portions of Carver's feet. Some of this is painful to learn, such as the way he treated his family and first wife. He always meant well, at least you can say that about him. By the time he and his first wife were deep into their alcoholism there were incidents of domestic violence. Those things are less fun to learn. Still, Carver produced some great work in his 50 years on the planet. Calling him the American Chekhov is a reasonable proposition, although we should also remember Chekhov was a doctor, died six years younger than Carver, and produced about five times as much work. I don't know Carver's poetry very well (or anyone's), but I see his stories putting him in the company of Sherwood Anderson, early Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever, which is no shabby lineage. I look forward to reading all his stories and reading them again. At the same time, there's a slightly sour taste from some aspects of his life, particularly the way his first wife was treated in the aftermath of his death. Sklenicka appears to have no dog in any of these fights in Carver's life, but I did come away with somewhat dimmed views of both Lish and Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. "Money changes everything" as a rock band from Atlanta called the Brains once noted—an eternal truth and no less so here. But Carver was a great writer and always will be. This biography does a solid job of telling the story.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Errand" (1987)

The last story in Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From collection—and possibly the last he wrote—is kind of a switch-up. It presents itself as the story of Anton Chekhov's death from tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44, perhaps anticipating his own imminent death at the age of 50. "Errand" appears to be factual but is not when read closely. The confusion is apparently deliberate because much of the story actually is factually accurate. Chekhov died in 1904, for example. I say it's obvious but it's not that obvious. Janet Malcolm has all the details in her book Reading Chekhov, pointing out how many of these confabulated details have seeped into other accounts of Chekhov's death, even formal biographies—the champagne, the layout of the room, observations of the physician and others who were there or might have been. Apparently a lot of people read this story and assumed Carver knew what he was talking about and these vivid but fictional details stuck with them. It's a shame in a way because it makes Carver look a little like a charlatan pulling it out of a hat. But no doubt it was intended as an homage and a secret desire (or not so secret) to be as great of a story writer. There's a scene within a memory of some seven years before the death, where Tolstoy visits Chekhov in the hospital and tells him he likes his stories more than his plays. Did that even "really" happen? I don't know. It feels like a dream but seems plausible, partly because I agree with Tolstoy in this anecdote. "Errand" never quite makes it to being typical Carver but comes closest after Chekhov dies, when the widow Olga Knipper is sending the bellboy for a mortician and giving him directions. In fact, it shifts into something else entirely toward the end, focusing on the bellboy and giving him some sort of epiphany around the champagne cork, which has fallen to the floor. The widow practically takes over narrative duties from that point in a strange kind of phantasm, seemingly from anxiety over whether the bellboy can carry out her complex and sensitive instructions. It's tantalizing to wonder whether "Errand" was the one-off it mostly appears to be, a strange meditation on death near his own end, or some new aspect to his work that would have seen further development.

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

"Menudo" (1987)

I like this story by Raymond Carver, but it probably bears comparison with John Updike's philandering suburban dwellers. It also hits really close to home if you know Carver's biography or anything about his first wife. The ex-wife in this story ("Molly") is obviously her. Molly's New Age chatter and other details, as reported by the first-person narrator, may be exaggerated but the story is never kind to her. Still, the premise is instantly affecting, even gripping. Our man has been having an affair with the married woman across the street. Her husband found out she was cheating, though not with whom. At the same time, or recently, our guy's second wife discovered his affair, though also not with whom. He won't tell her even as she keeps guessing and he lies when she guesses right. Amanda, the neighbor he has been sleeping with, has been given an ultimatum by her husband to leave within the week. Amanda wants to marry the narrator. He doesn't think he wants that but he doesn't know what he wants. He can't sleep. It's 4 in the morning. He sits in his kitchen and watches the lights in Amanda's place. She evidently can't sleep either. But he can't call her. His wife is in the house with him and she's having her own sleeping problems and mad enough already. Mostly the story follows the narrator's distraught thoughts and memories, many about his first wife. He's trying to sort out what it all means: love, commitment, change. He and his first wife grew apart even as it was the great love affair of their youth, if not their lives. His present wife and Amanda don't feel like deep commitments. Now he's middle-aged. His first wife has changed forever. He has nothing. As usual with Carver, it is vivid, strange, sharply thrown in our face. The narrator is not looking for advice. He would snarl at us if we tried. He is looking for relief. Suddenly he is middle-aged and he still doesn't know what he wants. It's a great portrait of a desperate state of mind, but also painful to read in its treatment of the first wife. I think it's also good enough it has a chance, circumstances allowing, of outliving us all.

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

"Where I'm Calling From" (1982)

Here we find Raymond Carver moving into the recovery phase of his writing (and life), acknowledging not only the realities of alcoholism but possibilities for the road back. He seems to understand the pitfalls well. This story is set in a treatment center ("drying-out facility"), with the first-person narrator there for a second round of rehab. Carver captures the best features of 12-step recovery while avoiding most of the worst. He notices without comment, for example, the coffee and sugar cookies. On the inevitable war stories he notes, "We'd all done things just as bad and crazy, so, sure, that's why we laughed." In fact, this story is mostly about their storytelling, specifically between the first-person narrator and another patient. They tell stories about broken relationships and bad mistakes. I feel sorry for these tellers more often than repulsed (which is often my reaction when 12-steppers start winding up into their stories). But they are still damaged and thus unsafe people. I appreciate the distance of only reading about them. Carver is so blunt and straightforward about these disasters that he is disarming. I don't think I'd care to meet either of these characters but their stories are absorbing and poignant. "Where I'm calling from" in this story is the treatment center—the narrator needs to talk to both his wife and his girlfriend but doesn't seem to be able to reach them. Carver was obviously fond of the story and its title, including it in Cathedral as well as in his last collection, which bears its name. Perhaps it represents his sense of both connection and distance, both at once. The treatment center is a place of connection, but many there are wounded and deeply flawed. Carver also parachutes Jack London into all this, name-checking both The Call of the Wild and "To Build a Fire," the latter given an interesting synopsis by the narrator. The story feels a bit mechanical but I think it works too. What's best is how the Carver voice carries on as usual even in a treatment center, a place that more often in fiction is overdone or underdone or done awkwardly, too piously. There is nothing like that here, and it is finally a great meditation on wreckage.

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

"A Small, Good Thing" (1981)

It's possible this Raymond Carver story with its suite of many versions is the best example of editor Gordon Lish's troubled relation to Carver's writing. First there is the Beginners version as originally submitted. It took a few significant changes from what Carver ultimately settled on for the later versions in Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From, adding back some of the weaknesses Lish had been likely trying to fix, but these three versions are reasonably consistent. Lish's version appeared as "The Bath" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It is barely recognizable and easily the most severe of all Lish's edit jobs. He slashed it from about 25 pages down to less than 10, basically just cutting out what are arguably the most important parts. It's really not even the same story and feels chaotic and pointless, especially when read with the other versions. Acknowledging Lish's overreach, however, does not mean I don't understand where his impulse came from. The story, which is used in the movie Short Cuts, might be Carver's single most famous, about an 8-year-old boy who is hit by a car on his birthday in a hit and run accident. His mother has ordered a special cake for his birthday but she never picks it up because she rushes to the hospital and forgets it after the accident. The baker gets mad and harasses them with crank calls. In the end, after the boy has died, the mother figures out who has been calling them and she and her husband go to the bakery to confront the baker. He apologizes and offers them rolls and bread fresh from the oven. Suddenly it is all a mellow introspective scene—the only thing left to hope is that the butter is freshly churned. It doesn't help that Lyle Lovett played the baker in the movie. And I think sentimentalizing hot bakery products is exactly what Lish was trying to push off the tracks here. It's frankly unbelievable. Lish may have been going about it all wrong—because ultimately such significant factors in a story are the author's call, however addled, and they should get final word (as Carver finally did). But I think Lish had the right impulse. The final version shows Carver taking many of Lish's other edits to heart, but obviously he liked and could not let go of the scene with the rolls and apology from Lyle Lovett and so forth. I think there might have been other, better ways to fix the story. But it remains interesting anyway for all these reasons and because the first two-thirds is actually prime and excellent Carver.

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

"Gazebo" (1980)

A lot of good stuff in this great Raymond Carver story—for once a story from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that was left relatively undisturbed by editor Gordon Lish. I like the setting in a cheap motel with the disintegrating 30something couple who manage it. Yes, shabby motels, drunken daze, and relationships gone bad are certainly familiar, but the way Carver handles them they are vivid and fresh. Holly and Duane are have shut down the front office for the day to hash things out with a bottle in a suite ("we needed a suite"). Holly has found out Duane has "gone outside the marriage" with the motel housekeeper and it's really the end. The story is told first-person by the philandering husband, whose relentless dialogue cues are variations on "go," e.g., "'Don't move to Nevada,' I go. 'You're talking crazy,' I go. 'I'm not talking crazy,' she goes." It is the way people tell stories (or did) but after a while it becomes a distracting tic here. I'm not even sure people talk that way anymore. The story has a strange urgency, perhaps because it is so fragmented. The couple's drunken day is punctuated by motel patrons, presumably with reservations, trying to get their attention outside the room. The story takes place across most of one day, with the single scene of a long, drawn-out talk, set off by numerous line breaks and memories. The gazebo turns up late, an extraordinary image from a memory of better times, a wonderful contrast to the dreary motel argument. Although "Gazebo" features a relationship that is ending, it is really more a study of alcoholism, what it sounds like and looks like in the wild and all the ways it moves. Drinking is what unites this couple even as it has sent their lives all to hell. They take it by the quart. "Gazebo" is so good on alcoholism it triggers me a little, recalling my own drunken episodes or those of others. There is a great tension that comes from their simultaneous final failure at managing the motel, which echoes their personal demise. In many ways this story feels like Carver is headed confidently into his best period of writing.

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

"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)

"Distance" (1975)

All the stories in the Raymond Carver collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are now available (in the Library of America collection) in the versions that Carver originally submitted to editor Gordon Lish for publication. Carver's title for the collection was Beginners and the differences in the various story versions clarify the extent to which Lish made changes. Even that long lovely mysteriously chatty title, which I always took as pure Carver, evidently came from Lish. As a general rule I am taking the versions Carver used in his last, best-of collection, Where I'm Calling From, as his final word on Lish's edits. In the case of "Distance," for example, Carver reworked it some, but essentially reverted to the version he submitted originally. It's nearly twice as long as the one in What We Talk About. I am basically with Carver on this one although I have also discovered that's not the case with every story. Lish always added improvements in his edits even if he didn't always improve a story on balance. The original "Distance" had details that should have stayed. In many ways, starting with these titles, it appears to be Lish who brought some of the brash, confident tone I have always associated with Carver. Indeed, Lish has boasted that he made Carver—certainly he had a lot to do with the Carver who staged such a grand entrance into American literature as the new avatar of short story fiction with What We Talk About. Carver the "minimalist" was largely Carver as edited by Lish. Maybe writers and editors collaborate a bit like comic book pencil and pen illustrators—an inker can often change the work of the main star, the penciller, radically. In "Distance," a father tells his grown daughter a story of when she was a baby. The raw, unedited Carver is both more plodding and earnest than Lish's final but in many ways plodding and earnest is the more suitable tone. as the first-person narrator father struggles to understand the 20-odd years that have passed and all the things since the events of the story. Note that I'm not attempting any close line readings in these side-by-sides. I'm only reading them consecutively for general impressions. Lish's cuts and changes make this story more intuitive and lively, as his edits often did. Instead of the admittedly inert "Distance," Lish gave his version a title that feels 100% more Carver, "Everything Stuck to Him." But in the end it is actually a story of deep melancholy, which works much better than the funny early marriage anecdote Lish turned it into.

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

"They're Not Your Husband" (1973)

This is one of Raymond Carver's stories that Robert Altman adapted for the Short Cuts movie. It's quite recognizable as the couple, Earl and Doreen, are played memorably by Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin. The movie characters had some details that came from elsewhere, not necessarily Carver, but this is the one where Earl sees his wife, working as a waitress, being ogled and commented on by men who don't know he's her husband. The moment is more poignant in the movie the way Waits plays it with Buck Henry and Huey Lewis, and in the story Doreen is more grotesquely ugly. The story is full of great Carver touches—the waitressing work, Earl's unemployment, the uneasy marriage—but it's also a little harsh and verges on unpleasant in Earl's treatment of Doreen, which is not really comical at all except in sardonic ways. Earl is "between jobs" and has a couple of interviews in this story, which don't seem to pan out (but you never know). His days are empty. His pushy insistence that Doreen lose weight, buying a scale and making blunt remarks to her, and his obvious shame about her appearance, are not in the movie as much and it makes the story edgy and nervous. In a later scene Earl is more of a creep at the restaurant, trying to egg remarks about Doreen out of a man who's not inclined to talk to him. With another waitress he acts like he doesn't know Doreen. The final scene is a moment of withering humiliation. On balance Earl and Doreen seem largely benign but I get some sense Carver has it in for them somehow, Doreen for her looks (much like Earl, in fact) and Earl as a pathetic nebbish. In Carol Sklenicka's excellent biography, Raymond Carver, there's a great comment from one fellow writer and/or student along the way. He says Carver is writing about working-class characters but really they're all graduate students—that's what Carver knew. I see some of that here in Earl, scrounging for generic work, chronically poor, depending on a partner to support him, but capable of attacking a problem like weight loss systematically, buying the scale, keeping track of the numbers, and analyzing and mulling them over—and doing it all to right a very minor perceived wrong. This one sports another great story title too.

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

"Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes" (1973)

I like the title of this story by Raymond Carver, which feels typically brusque and to the point. It almost looks like a kind of outline for the points he wants the story to cover, a little list to guide the drafting. More affecting is the event that erupts almost accidentally, certainly unexpectedly: a fistfight between two fathers about a conflict between their sons. One man has been trying to quit smoking for two days, so he's already on edge. The other man seems ready to take a swing at anyone who criticizes his boy. The story takes places in some rundown precinct of the American suburban sprawl, where young families in startup homes summon one another to address mutual problems of their children. The provoking incident here is the disappearance of one boy's bicycle. He thinks these two other boys did it and so his mother sends for the parents to straighten it all out. The dialogue with the fathers grows increasingly hostile and suddenly they are moving out to the yard and going at it. The mother hastily postpones any decisions and the meeting ends with the fight. The story has Carver's usual strangely jaunty voice but it stirs deep reactions. The fight, though in retrospect easy to see coming, is still disturbing, as all sudden fights like it are. It reminded me of one time when I saw two guys fighting next to an auto accident as I drove by. It bothered me for days. I still remember the shock and the feeling that nothing was in control. Those feelings are captured well here, especially the way it makes the boys cry after it's all over. Their shame and confusion is palpable, their own sudden sense that nothing is in control. Folding the nicotine addiction into it is inspired. Even in 1973 quitting smoking was becoming an adult rite of passage and it's well known how it frays nerves in the early days. At a stroke it makes this unlikely fight that much more believable. These things happen. You hear about them. Carver's great idea is simply to show it and somehow it is as vivid as if it happened. He has everything just about right here. It's quick, and it lands like a blow.

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

"What's in Alaska?" (1972)

This story by Raymond Carver is an interesting and peculiar period piece. Written in 1972, it features an evening get-together pot party with two young couples, one with children. It surprised me because I haven't seen this kind of thing attempted often in literature. It does feel a bit like the depictions on the '60s Dragnet TV show, especially when it reminds us one couple has children (though they don't appear to be accidentally drowned in the bathtub as in the Jack Webb episode). It also trades in cliches that are cliches because so true, e.g., the ravenous appetite for snacks, the empty laughter, the disconnected conversation. Carver is as specific on the treats as he is accurate—corn chips, popsicles, cream soda, etc.—and there's also a "new" water pipe, a hookah. The only name used for what they're smoking is "stuff," which is probably wise because the attempt to choose one usually reflects more about the writer, whether it's cannabis, marijuana, grass, pot, weed, reefer, flower, or whatever. There are also strange intimations of infidelity across the couples, which felt jarring and out of place in a way, as if this unusual Carver story had been intruded upon by more typical Carver stories. So I'm not sure, overall, how well it works. But I appreciate the attempt, not least because I haven't seen it much, or at least not working so well on the social dynamics. Others such as Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon have addressed the issue one way or another but they haven't been as convincing on the level of social manners. There must be much more out there. For that matter, the pot party is not the only thing going on in this story, which is also about infidelity, alienation, loneliness—Carver's constants. But smoking dope is the main point in the foreground and likely what most people would say the story is about. So that's what I focus on, as the rest seems pro forma, there for the reflexive gravitas. Carver captures well the aimlessness of smoking-up conversation, quite sharply in a couple places. He's good with the constant giggling self-conscious laughter, which can break for hysterics for no apparent reason, often based on nothing or very little that is actually funny. He's obviously been in the situation and noticed things. But overall the story also misses as least as often as it hits.

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

"What Do You Do in San Francisco?" (1967)

One of the interesting points about this story by Raymond Carver is that it's hard to say who it is about. The first-person narrator, a mailman, declares up-front, "This has nothing to do with me." He tells us all about himself. Then there is the couple he's formally concerned with, the Marstons, whom he refers to as beatniks. The narrator's name is Henry Robinson. He's divorced and hasn't, he mentions, seen his children in 20 years. The Marstons have moved to the small town of Arcata in Northern California, and Robinson, their mailman, spends the story trying to figure them out. They are young, apparently unemployed (Robinson presses suggestions for work, but they ignore him), and they have three young kids, two girls and a boy. Robinson decides almost right away he doesn't like the woman, and in fact, as the story goes along (and it's not that long), he soon has a very strong dislike of her. Which approximately mirrors our dislike of him. He's clearly a dick even though he tries to act like an easygoing sort of happy regular fellow. The most glaring questions here are about Robinson's former life, just as his are about the Marstons'—not so much his divorce as why he hasn't seen his own children in so long. My sense is he's just kind of an emotional deadbeat who can't live up to his responsibilities, even as he judges the Marstons. He casually washes his hands of any responsibility he doesn't care to acknowledge. It's possible he's precluded from seeing his kids for some legal reason, but he's also the kind of guy who would bring that up as excuse in his own defense. Anyway, he tracks the lives of the Marstons as much as a mailman can (which turns out to be a fair amount) and reports the details in this story. Eventually, in his telling, Robinson's hunch about the Marston woman is right, as she runs away with another man, leaving the children behind. The story has Carver's abrupt tone and shifts in focus, as if coming from a place of constant distraction, a remarkable sketch of the modern mind coping with confusion. The pseudo-spying aspect is entertaining and the revelations are often startling, almost but not quite adding up to something in a way that feels like typical life. The strange sloppiness of the title may be speaking to that turmoil of distraction. The question that occurs in the story (emphasis mine) is "What did you do in San Francisco?"—a passing remark in a casual conversation. Small talk. Why is it the title and why is it changed? I don't know, but I like a lot of things about this one.

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

"The Student's Wife" (1964)

Although this is a fairly early story for Raymond Carver, published when he was about 26, his elliptical and fragmented approach is already apparent. You keep getting the feeling there are things we're not being told, forgotten by the narrator in his rush to tell it, whatever exactly "it" is. The student in this story might actually be a student but we get little indication of that beyond the title. He is the husband and his wife appears to be a housewife. She has insomnia and comes off as insanely needy. Women might well see it another way. Her husband, it appears, reads poetry to her every night before bed to help her sleep (perhaps the only sign he is a student). But it's not helping her this night, and after a certain point the guy just wants to sleep. She wants him to stay awake until she falls asleep but he can't. She finally gets up and looks at magazines all night. It's a pretty good sketch of insomnia—all the random things you do, thoughts you have, the almost sleeping and then waking, the preoccupation with sleep that is finally preventing it. Her distress grows worse and worse. She experiences the bleakest sunrise of her life, and at the end of the story is seen on her knees beseeching God to "help us" even as her husband "looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched." It's quite a crescendo for nothing evidently going on. Something obviously is. This husband and wife may not know any better than us. It could well be their marriage is coming apart, a popular midcentury theme. But we really don't know. Why can't she sleep? Why doesn't her husband care (and why is "jaws" plural)? How bad is it? The story is haunted by a sense of unnamed and perhaps unnamable dread, which also seems about right for its time. It was originally published in the Carolina Quarterly, an academic journal, but it also feels like it could have gone somewhere more commercial, even a women's magazine. Or almost—it might be a bit arty. Even with the gaps and missing information there is always something that feels authentic to me about Carver at these feverish pitches he can reach. With "The Student's Wife" it's like he's exploding the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf dynamic from the inside. These people are too repressed for knockdown battles. Yet at the end of the story they are both clearly knocked down—not by each other but on their own, on separate paths. Carver is good at this even this early.

Note: I started on reading Carver's stories with Where I'm Calling From, the late best-of collection and the last one he had any hand in before he died. That was for convenience because I already had a copy. I still was only dimly aware of the issue of Gordon Lish's editing, but know better now that it most severely altered what is perhaps Carver's most regarded collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The issue of Lish's editing is complicated, but in Where I'm Calling From we see Carver reclaiming and/or reworking himself some of those pieces. The Library of America collection has both versions of What We Talk About—the edited version that was published along with the version submitted by Carver under the title Beginners. I'm going to get to some of that as I go, looking at versions of those stories side by side. For now, I feel pretty good about Where I'm Calling From. It has what we can call Carver's final word on some of the stories from What We Talk About, plus a handful of stories unpublished before 1988 and a solid best-of from the whole of his career. If you don't know him it is probably the best place to start. I'll be using the titles and most of the versions from there.

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

"Cathedral" (1983)

Read story by Raymond Carver online.

The collection this story headlines was something of a breakthrough for Raymond Carver, and the story is one of his most anthologized. It feels more worked over and literary than the raw naturalism of "Fever," for example. It's a strange story in many ways, with strange people doing strange things, but it has real power. It's told in the first person by a man whose wife has invited an old friend of hers, a blind man who recently lost his wife, to visit and stay with them. The narrator does not like this. He is more or less candid about his discomfort with the man's disability, a theme he keeps coming back to until inevitably his discomfort has made us uncomfortable with his attitude. The blind man, Robert—the husband / narrator and wife remain unnamed—is loose and balanced, able to roll with the situation. Or maybe he has some agenda? It's hard to tell. He calls the narrator "bub," which the narrator doesn't know exactly how to take. They stay up late the first night. Robert is not tired, or doesn't know how to take a hint. Then the story becomes very strange. The wife leaves to change into nightclothes, comes back to the living room, and soon falls asleep. The television is on in the room. Robert says he doesn't mind. The narrator produces some marijuana to smoke. For Robert it's his first time. On the TV is a documentary about European history. Presently it begins to discuss and show historical cathedrals. The narrator seizes on this as a way to relate to Robert. "Something has occurred to me," he says. "Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they're talking about?" Robert dryly responds with recitations of facts they have both just heard. The narrator seems impossibly selfish and self-centered. He cannot see Robert as a valid person, and he can't hide it from Robert any better than he has from us. In fact, he is so candid in his narration about his prejudices and ignorance that it brings you up a little short as the reader. He tragically believes himself a solid man of common sense, and easygoing and humorous too. He is an everyman we have all met. He is the cast of Seinfeld, including supporting players. Carver puts him into the middle of a cunningly conceived situation—a blind man who calls him "bub"!—winds him up and lets him go. What follows is remarkable, when the blind man presses the issue of what a cathedral looks like.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

"Fever" (1983)

Story by Raymond Carver not available online.

Raymond Carver puts on a clinic in modern short story fiction writing with this story from his Cathedral collection. "Fever" is less often anthologized than other stories in Cathedral, which also includes the title story, "Where I'm Calling From," "Vitamins," and others. But Carver made it his contribution to the anthology American Short Story Masterpieces, which he edited with Tom Jenks in 1987. That might indicate some feeling he had for it. In many ways it's typical of Carver, focused on a family at the moment it crumbles and full of incidents that are just out of control, like bad dreams. The first-person narrator, Carlyle, is a high school art teacher. He tells how his wife Eileen unexpectedly left him and their two children at the end of the previous school year, in early June. Now it's September, the start of the new school year, and his life is in total disarray. He has spent the summer attempting to come to terms with the loss, which he believes is only temporary. Eileen has left him to live with a former colleague of his. The school year is starting but Carlyle still has not made arrangements for day care of the children. At the last minute, he hires the first person he finds, a "fat girl" named Debbie who is 19. A few days later he comes home to find his children unattended on the front lawn, except by a dangerous-looking dog. Inside the house, Debbie is partying with three teenage boys. So it goes. Carlyle still talks to Eileen but he is beginning to hate her. She is full of nonsensical touchy-feely recovery talk. Eileen sends greetings from Carlyle'a former colleague every time they talk. There's more, with the same extremes of ups and downs, as coping proceeds. It's hard to convey the feeling of reading it—it's so immediate, so vivid. Carver was expert at plumbing these emotional pivot points inside people. No one, not even Debbie, is entirely unsympathetic, and everyone is capable of turning inward and doing the right thing. And the wrong thing. The pathos and confusions of the situation—a divorce, with young children involved—are captured well. There's even a nice and simple revelation that powers the story, as Carlyle shifts from believing his marriage can be saved and isn't over, to accepting that it is. This is a great example of what makes Carver so good.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Short Cuts (1993)

USA, 187 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Raymond Carver, Robert Altman, Frank Barhydt
Photography: Walt Lloyd
Music: Mark Isham
Editors: Suzy Elmiger, Geraldine Peroni
Cast: Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Zane Cassidy, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Joseph C. Hopkins, Josette Macario, Robert Downey Jr., Lili Taylor, Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Peter Gallagher, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, Huey Lewis, Alex Trebek

I think I might be safe in calling Short Cuts the last great Robert Altman picture that Robert Altman ever made—though at least two others by him that came later, Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion, are worth chasing down for other reasons. But Short Cuts goes further, taking that patented messy style Altman perfected in the '70s, with handfuls of interesting characters, overlapping dialogue, and parallel narratives that operate like string theory alternate universes, occasionally brushing up against one another to ignite little big bangs and new universes, and raising it all a notch higher by dressing it up in the emotional finery of shards and fragments of Raymond Carver stories, transposed to Los Angeles.

It is a tremendous and brave reimagining of Raymond Carver that happens to work very well. The cast is dazzling. The jazzy soundtrack is surprisingly propulsive. It's strange and beautiful and alienating from its first shot, the glorious landscape of Los Angeles seen at night from above, a community united by television, celebrity, helicopters, tony culture, and cars. Into this intrude the fragments of Carver, familiar, haunting, seared into anyone who has read them: the boy who dies before his parents can pick up the birthday cake they ordered for him; the fishermen who find the corpse of a 23-year-old woman who has been raped and murdered, and simply go on fishing until they catch their limit; the man who methodically destroys everything in his estranged wife's home while she is away for the weekend. In the end, I think this turns out to be a great, unexpected match of unique sensibilities, on a par with Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg for A.I. Artificial Intelligence.