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The Uncollected Fiction

and Other Prose

By Raymond Carver

Vintage: 300 pp., $13 paper

Five new stories are presented and introduced with the kind of “here-we-are-making-history” literary solemnity that we learned from the British. But never mind. He’s our very own Raymond Carver, finger on the American pulse, who donned the mantle of Hemingway and Dos Passos, who was taken from us at 50 in 1988, by lung cancer.

This collection also includes essays, early stories (including the very first, “Furious Season”), a piece of a novel, some introductions and some book reviews, all previously uncollected. Carver is, of course, a short-story samurai, way beyond criticism. Nothing can help him now, and one suspects it wasn’t useful when he lived, either. You just have to read him and struggle with him, the way you might with a father. Not a mother. Carver carries our shame and pride in the way that fathers do. And he wields it. These new stories plow familiar ground for a new generation of Carver admirers. “Kindling” features a man in the postpartum period after the end of his marriage. There’s a transition, but it’s going to be OK. In “Dreams,” Carver takes us to the brink he often visits: the death of children. “Vandals” is a beautiful example of another famous Carver lesson: Life is compounded daily; each incident, each detail, each soda cracker, each birth and death and marriage and divorce adds its fuel to the blaze we go up in. Horses, loose car mufflers (a detail from Carver’s childhood) and other familiar set pieces appear throughout the stories and essays.

“On Writing,” Carver’s terse six pages on how to achieve clarity, rests in the belly of the collection: No “tricks” allowed, he tells us, but there’s nothing wrong with including “a little menace” in a story. Above all, a short story must start, Carver tells us from the grave, with a glimpse. These tips are good to read, but in the end, as a friend who is a marvelous cook recently remarked, you can give the same recipe to eight friends and you’ll still end up with eight different dishes.

*

WOODCUTS OF WOMEN

By Dagoberto Gilb

Woodcuts by Artemio Rodriguez

Grove Press: 168 pp., $23

“It was one of those days,” a character in an airport bar flirting with a woman who is not his girlfriend thinks, “when I was a man.” At several points in these stories about loving women, the male character will feel “like a man.” Perhaps a suit or a job or a part of El Paso will make him feel that way, but more often it will be a woman. Most of these men barely realize how tightly they are laced to women. They describe their love of women as a kind of freedom, but as they run to the next one, they are always looking back over their shoulders at the one they really love, the pure one, the first girlfriend who was just 16 or the one they are cheating on. Then they feel remorse, and it makes them look so cute on the page, victims of themselves. “I would study blueprints and have my own business some day,” one man thinks, pretending to look forward when really he can only look back, tied as he is to the past, to mama and the virgin. In these rippling, musical stories, it looks circumstantially like the women are stuck, but really, it is the men and their hopeless running who provide the tension. They all, in some way, snap back. The woodcuts are lovely (each with its different pair of breasts) and give the book a Garden-of-Eden look. As funny and lighthearted as these stories are, it must be said, the pattern, the routine, the running give the collection a clownish circus feel.

*

THE FUNERAL PARTY

By Ludmila Ulitskaya

Translated from the Russian

by Cathy Porter

Schocken: 154 pp., $18.95 paper

“Only when he went to America and lived there several years did he understand the American envy of Old Europe, with its cultural subtlety--and also Europe’s disdainful, but fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America.” These two faces of envy smirk and snarl outside the New York apartment where a group of Russian emigres stands vigil at the bedside of their dying friend, the painter Alik. The writing in “The Funeral Party” may be a little cartoon-like, a little plain, but the intricate net of relationships around and under the bed of the dying man is fascinating. In the Tolstoy-esque flurry of names, characters are distinguished in sexual terms: so-and-so who slept with so-and-so, or wanted so-and-so or abandoned so-and-so. The many shades of desire remind a reader of the legendary number of Eskimo words for snow. In America, it seems, we have friends, family, lovers and parents; four kinds of love. Could it really be that in Russia they have more? Ludmila Ulitskaya makes it seem so. Alik’s wife, Nina, burns with desire (religious fervor) to have her husband baptized before he dies. Alik burns with desire for his mistress. You can just imagine New York in the summertime, how very warm it gets.