Carver's shrewd new publisher here repackages 30 stories - a few
with new titles - from his four collections, and includes seven
uncollected pieces, one of which has never seen print. This
selection spans 25 years and provides the perfect opportunity to
assess an acclaimed career. For the most part, Carver's seven new
pieces add little to his inflated reputation. The trite imagery,
the deliberately stale language, and the unintentional bathos - all
the elements of Carver's common-man pose - continue to generate
tales of failure and false promise, a neo-proletarian rhetoric of
victimization and survival. His male narrators often wallow in
self-pity, and their problems usually concern women. In "Boxes," a
divorced man's mother - herself a lonely widow - moves nearby,
making his life miserable with her constant complaining, though her
packing up to move again only makes him feel worse. Another story
with a single dominant, hard image - "Menudo" - is about "a
middle-aged man involved with his neighbor's wife," a state of
affairs that forces him to realize his failures with women: his
mother, his ex-wife, his present wife. "Intimacy" elaborates on
this theme for, here, the narrator shows up unannounced at his
ex-wife's house where the shrew harangues him about the past - a
past he's already exploited in his "work." More Roth-like
reflections on success underpin "Elephant," in which the narrator
complains about all those who rely on him for money - his "greedy"
mother, his hapless brother, his former wife, his son in college,
his white-trashy daughter with children. While this tiresome tale
ends with a sloppily sentimental affirmation, "Whoever Was Using
This Bed" finds no such hope for the husband and wife who obsess
about "death and annihilation," and their bad health and habits.
The only surprise in this volume is the final story - a fictional
re-creation of Chekhov's death, based largely on memoirs, that's
quite unlike any of Carver's previous work, and may signal a new
stage in his development, away from the cliches of contemporary
rootlessness. Regardless of Carver's actual achievement, his spare
and simple style has set the tone for a generation of story
writers, so that this. ample volume serves as the best introduction
to what's happening in contemporary short fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)
Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own choice of his short stories, revised the texts and published them in this authoritative edition. The stories in Where I'm Calling From are selected from the full range of the author's work, including Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love and Cathedral and include all seven stories from his last collection, Elephant.
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