17 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Raymond Carver has attracted as much critical attention as any modern
short-story writer. The MLA bibliography lists some 280 critical articles about
his work. Students beginning study of Carver’s stories must first seek reliable
guidance. Ewing Campbell and Kirk Nesset, cited below are good starting
points, and Arthur M. Saltzman’s Understanding Raymond Carver is perhaps
the best. Carver’s relationship with his heavy-handed editor Gordon Lish is
an interesting study. The Library of America edition of Carver’s works (2009)
includes “Beginners,” the unedited version of “What We Talk about When We
Talk about Love” that Carver submitted to Lish, which indicates the significant
role Lish played in shaping Carver’s writing style.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Like his earlier work, most of the stories in Where I’m Calling From feature
working-class characters. Carver affectionately referred to his working-class
characters as “my people,” those who, despite their lack of social mobility and
economic restrictions, lived their lives the best way they could manage, as in
“Chef ’s House,” “Feathers,” and “Elephant.” Students interested in Carver’s
people would benefit from Ben Harker’s analysis of images of “socio-economic
disempowerment and diminished class consciousness” in Carver’s work. Also
useful is Paul Lauter’s “Under Construction: Working-Class Writing,” in New
Working Class Studies, edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (Ithaca,
N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 63–77. Although Lauter does not
specifically address Carver, he identifies features of working-class writing that
provide an excellent framework for discussing Carver’s fiction. Lauter reminds
students to consider how class is related not only to thematic issues but also
narrative form. - Surely inspired by his life experience, alcoholism remains a major theme through-
out Carver’s fiction, many of his characters suffering from various degrees of alco-
holism as they struggle to overcome the “dis-ease” in their lives. In “Why Don’t
You Dance?” a middle-aged man relinquishes the possessions from his failed
marriage, presumably ending because of his drinking. The two couples in “What
We Talk about When We Talk about Love” use gin as a social lubricant that
enables them to speak candidly about their definitions of love. “Chef ’s House”
represents an alcoholic’s denial of his addiction. A man is inspired to reconcile his
marriage which failed due to excessive drinking after listening to the story of a
fellow patient at a treatment center in “Where I’m Calling From.” Students inter-
ested in investigating the realism of Carver’s depiction of alcoholism can use as a
model John Magee’s interpretation of “Chef ’s House”; those interested in tracing
the effects of Carver’s own struggles with alcoholism and recovery will find useful
the biographical-based analysis in Chad Wriglesworth’s “Raymond Carver and
Alcoholics Anonymous: A Narrative Under the ‘Surface of Things,’” in Sandra
Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner’s collection (pages 132–153). Students may also
wish, as some literary critics have, to trace the symbolic and narrative functions of
alcohol and drinking in Carver’s fiction. As Kirk Nesset observes, drinking often
fills in when characters “cannot speak their pain.”