Call If You Need Me
Any recommendation carries a caveat. The main selling point is five short stories uncovered amongst Raymond Carver's papers in 1999, eleven years after the poet, writer and critic's untimely death. They constitute just 74 pages of 300, the rest largely made up of Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, a 1984 odds and sods compilation. Far from being uncollected this is simply a beautifully presented - albeit significantly augmented - reprint.
And while it's undoubtedly pleasing to see any 'new' Carver, whatever the circumstance, any discerning reader will surely find themselves asking why it was that the man himself elected to secrete this stuff away in a drawer rather than bring it to his publisher's attention. The conclusion? That these are largely second-string. The traits and tropes are all there - the silences, meanings that fall between the actual words; like Edward Hopper paintings given a walking-talking intellectual life - but nothing here measures up to bona fide greats like 'A Small, Good Thing', 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' or 'So Much Water So Close to Home'.
The best of them, 'What Would You Like To See?', features a couple, Phil and Sarah, who haven't had "anything to drink for nearly a year now", who get invited over to their landlord's the night before they move. Pete, likewise, is a recovering alcoholic. At dinner he and Phil are on the wagon while their wives get steadily drunk. The end is quietly, almost insignificantly devastating. Similarly in 'Vandals' where events in the wider world interrupt the troubled dynamic of two married couples who gather for "a champagne brunch without the champagne."
By any standards this is fine stuff, but it does carry with it the nagging doubt that perhaps the famous editing process hadn't finished with them. Either that or they'd been found wanting. We'll never know and there are no clues in the glutinous, rather queasy foreword by his widow, poet Tess Gallagher. She veers from the florid ("Here in the Northwest we often set out rain barrels in order to catch some of nature's bounty... This book is like rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky") to the frankly incomprehensible ("These characters' lives are so plundered by circumstance that they become our own.") She does his legacy no favours. If you're new to Raymond Carver start with the brilliant Where I'm Calling From collection; you'll still get here eventually.