BOOK REVIEW
In Carver's taut stories, a roar becomes a shudder
By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff, 1/21/2001Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
By Raymond Carver
Vintage Contemporaries, 300 pp., $13 (paper)Raymond Carver was a raw natural, a writer who captured a peculiar essence of private pain and made it his fictional world. The people in Carver stories don't have problems, they have ''troubles'' - mortgages and alcoholism and broken pipes or broken histories, often with the promise of nothing but gray mornings ahead. Scourges or little miseries, the unspoken agony of a Carver situation can fill all its rooms; there's a stifling silence that makes the act of reading itself somewhat nerve-racking. The standard term for this quality of grim uncertainty is narrative tension, and it's true that he worked for years to pare enough away in his stories to get it right. But the distinctive trait that no amount of experimentation or hard work could guarantee is Carver's ache of self-consciousness: not in any enlightened sense, but rather as the relentless awareness of one's own palpable weight in the world. George Eliot called this terrifying knowledge ''the roar on the other side of silence,'' and Carver, hauling it into the modern short story, made the roar into a shudder.

He died in 1988, when he was 50, only five years after he had ventured to new and marvelous heights with his 1983 collection, ''Cathedral.'' He had stopped drinking a decade before his death, and it's hard still not to mourn the work that might have come - the years he should have had left for a writing life in full ascent. The early death canonized him, and finished the story: His name now is synonymous with the renaissance in the short story in the late 20th century, and implies a singular milieu of petrified dread.

So the temptation must have been great to publish whatever remained - ''the last of the last,'' as his widow calls it - of Carver's papers. But ''Call If You Need Me'' is a jerry-rigged affair, disappointing though unsurprising in its failure to enhance the Carver oeuvre. How many great efforts in literary history have been published posthumously? Why can't editors and executors leave well enough alone?

''Call If You Need Me'' is a collaborative effort by Carver's life partner and executrix, the poet Tess Gallagher, and William L. Stull, a Carver scholar who discovered two unpublished stories in an archive at Ohio State University. The three other ''new'' stories herein were found in Carver's desk, unfinished but intact enough to warrant their publication. Various essays and reviews have been reassembled to flesh out this edition, including a couple of classic ones on writing and on Carver's father. But the only real interest, for scholars as well as readers, are the stories, which consist of the five new works (published recently in Granta and Esquire) and five early ones written in the 1960s.

''Kindling'' is a sad story about solitude and mercy, wherein a man - just out of detox and estranged from his wife - takes a room in an oceanside town to wait out the next phase of life. There's a dissonant, unclaimed sorrow to all the new stories; in ''What Would You Like to See?'' a couple, planning to separate, spend most of their last days trying to say polite and tender goodbyes. After that stilted minuet, the horrors awaiting a family in ''Dreams'' are almost a welcome relief. Two stories involve deadly fires (one of them, ''Vandals,'' also has a couple of errors and repetitions). There are a few Carver moments here where Bad Things Happen to Everyone - ''Somebody's house is burning,'' says a child, prophetically - as well as the death-heavy recurring image of a pale, riderless horse. But the only story that seems anywhere approaching the work Carver was publishing in his last years is the title story. ''Call If You Need Me'' is about a last-gasp effort to resurrect a marriage that has known trouble for a long time. It's tremendously sad and ordinary, and sad because it's ordinary: One feels the dissolution of good intentions like a boulder upon the chest. The one false note is a too-tender thought the man has as his wife boards a plane; Carver, who worked to strip the adornment from everything he wrote, would certainly have edited it out.

For transitional and comparative reasons, it's edifying to read a few of these early Carver stories, written in his 20s. ''Furious Seasons'' was published in a small collection by the same name; it's pure stream-of-consciousness, manipulating time and space with memory, sounding more like early Faulkner than early Carver. A dark, obliquely tormented account of a family horror, the story is passionate and overwritten - and reminds one of Hemingway's dictum to go back and find everything beautiful in a piece of writing and take it out. ''The Hair'' is a little four-page tale of quotidian anxiety, a state Carver would later refine to new levels of trepidation. ''Bright Red Apples'' confronts violence head-on; it suggests by the failures of its bloody plot how much better a writer Carver became by hiding his terrors in the margins.

Some controversy has arisen in recent years as to whether Carver did that hiding on his own. Gordon Lish, a legendary fiction editor at Esquire who later became notorious as a self-appointed Guru of Minimalism, was instrumental as both mentor and editor of Carver's work. He also seems to have had a fierce hand in dumping whatever tenderness was in sight and carving out the ice sculptures that lay within. Most of this is an old and unknowable mystery (the Maxwell Perkins phenomenon), but both the early stories here (published pre-Lish, in college literary mags) and the new discoveries show the writer outside the rein of Lish's influence. Lish may have turned bleak into stark and scary into terrifying, but he didn't make Carver any more Carver than he already was - he was working with a sensibility that was already formed.

I met Raymond Carver in the last months before he died, when he had already lost one lung to the cigarettes he had chain-smoked for years. He was weak and could barely speak above a whisper, but his eyes were alive with light. He was reverent about literature but humble about his own work, which he seemed to think simply happened when he got out of its way. ''I'm just flying blind,'' he told me with a kind of innocent glee. ''Flying by the seat of my pants.''I knew what he meant, but not for a minute did I believe him. No one could claim such modest agency within the firmament of fiction, and yet manage to fly quite so high.