Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
For many years, Robert Coles taught a class at Harvard called General Education 105, "The Literature of Social Reflection." It was widely and accurately perceived as a gut course, wherein the students read great books and then proceeded to sit around and talk about how the books made us feel. This was the course description:
An examination of selected novels, essays, poems, and autobiographical statements which aim at social scrutiny or at a moral critique of a particular society. Lectures emphasize the distinctive approach of the literary mind to a variety of social problems: poverty, racial injustice, historical change, the various tensions of rural and urban life. Authors studied include...
In fact, the authors studied varied amongst the small sections. While Dr. Coles gave the lectures, there were also weekly meetings in small groups led by a teaching assistant (TA), usually one of Dr. Coles' graduate students, and the TA's supplemented the skeletal required reading list with their own choices from a master list selected by Dr. Coles. My TA, who became a good friend, was particularly fond of Raymond Carver, and we were assigned to read several stories from Where I'm Calling From and several poems from A New Path to the Waterfall.
My performance in the class reflected the fact that I was it was fall of my senior year. In addition to senioritis, I was knee-deep in applications to law school, and had yet to decide whether to actually go to law school rather than immediately enter active duty as an Army tank officer. So I may have skipped a bit of the reading here and there.
While I missed out on some great reading at the time, I did not miss the point that this was important, moving literature. Our small sections were some of my favorite hours spent at Harvard, listening to other students' reactions to the books, as well as reflections on their own life stories. I have kept James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, William Carlos Williams and others on my reading list ever since.
High on that list was Carver's Where I'm Calling From. I'm a bit ashamed it took me five years to finally get around to it, but it was well worth the wait. Carver's reputation for minimalism is well-earned. The characters are utterly unexceptional, and Carver's narrators offer little guidance on what the stories mean or how the characters are to be judged. It is left to us to dig into the sparse prose and pull out deeper meaning.
This, of course, makes Carver's stories a goldmine for a course like Gen Ed 105. Every student brought a different perspective and many had wildly different reactions to the stories. Particularly with Carver's emphasis on broken or breaking families and alcoholism, those readers with divorce and/or alcoholism in their lives saw things quite differently from those of us spared such trauma.
Point being, what I loved about reading Carver was that I felt truly engaged by the work, without being made to feel stupid or tricked by an overly complicated literary style. It was the sparse simplicty itself that forced me, as the reader, to make my own judgments and grapple with the ambiguities and complexities of ordinary life.
Highly recommended for all lovers of thoughtful modern fiction.
