Where
I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
By Raymond Carver
For my birthday this past year, a certain someone who signs my paychecks gave
me this book. Obviously, then, I had to read it. But I didn’t have to choose
it to review on the Libretto website. I did so because I was so enthralled by
the style and perspective of this late master of the short story genre. This
collection, published just three months before his death from cancer at age 50
in 1988, brings together 30 works from previous books, as well as seven previously
unpublished stories. Perhaps what is most striking in such a retrospective is
Carver’s ability to maintain his unique lens while keeping his tales compelling,
empathic, and surprising. He is able to write convincingly from both male and
female perspectives, and his stories can plumb the depths of hopelessness and
the heights of redemption. Like any short story writer, Carver presents a snapshot
of people’s lives. In another writer’s hands, these snapshots would
be moments of highest drama, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Carver,
however, makes us aware that there are other stories, even bigger stories, going
on in the blurred periphery of his viewfinder. Stories are introduced at some
point beyond the start of a situation. At the end, we know that there are events
and consequences that await the characters in scenes that will be played out
beyond our view. The person who gave me this book (you know, the kind and generous
one who signs my paychecks) particularly recommended "The Cathedral," in
which a person who spends an evening with a blind man against his will begins
to see many things more clearly, but the story immediately after that one burned
most deeply in my mind. In "A Small, Good Thing," a rewrite of an earlier
story, two parents must face their worst fear while dealing with a doctor’s
vague assurances and a prank phone-caller. While a theme of the first two-thirds
of the story is the impact of lack of knowledge, communication, and understanding,
the final third is a dramatic stripping away of everything the characters had
been keeping from each other. The title of the story is a good description of
the book. Jason M. Rubin
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