You’ll get a bad review of a Ray Carver book out of me just after a bad review of a TVPs album, that’s true. But then we hit “Call If You Need Me"--The Uncollected Fiction and other Prose. I saw it, I had to have it, I read it, it all seemed a little yadda yadda. In six point type at the bottom of the front page I found out why: “(A revised and expanded edition of No Heroics Please).

I had “NHP” already. It wasn’t that great. It was OK. Carver, unlike his contemporary Bukowski apparently didn’t leave us much left. “Call if You Need Me” has five newly discovered stories, over and above what was newly discovered from “No Heroics..."--in honesty, these ain’t stories as Ray would tell them, more drafts than anything else. Ray loved to, lived to, rewrite--he crafted his prose like a lathe. Nothing you didn’t need, nothing that wouldn’t make you cry. Reading “Call..” was re-reading “No Heroics” but with filler. His wife (Tess Gallagher) even alludes to this ("When we read great writers, we want to write all we can, no matter how shitty and awful!")--ok, she doesn’t say that with such refreshing honesty, but that’s what she means.

So I got gypped. By some beautiful stories. By some memoirs. By writing with a purity finest as the best whiskey. $13.00. By works that made me weep. Gypped, gypped I tell you.

Yeah, I can’t write a bad review of a Raymond book: unemployed and close enough to penniless I bought my hardcover copy of “A New Path to the Waterfall (New Poems)” in a Glasgow bookstore as he died. Same day.

Reality check:
I bought “A New Path...” in hardcover (the UK edition, it -might- have come before the US one, I can go to the garage and dig it out). At the time, RC was kinda popular with wanks in the UK, but not, you know, Steve King popular. I’d read all of his stuff in Picador editions, and I’d been waiting and waiting for the new book. It was twenty something pounds ($35) hardcover. I hummed and hawed and considered shoplifting, but finally decided “fuck it, he deserves the money” and bought it. At home that day a minor news item was “Ray Carver, American author dies”.

Now, I was fairly fucked up at the time. But I remember it clearly. The weight of the book in my hands suddenly heavier.

Honestly, Ray didn’t die that day. I found out he had died that day. It felt the same. A hollow refuge.

“Call If You Need Me” is a much better title than “No Heroics, Please"--both are dismissive, but the former engages, while the latter dismisses. The cover design is not so hot, but designers these days, what can you do?

I should mention the content I guess, as this is a review. The shorts are as always beautiful, simple, heartfelt and just so perfect. No tricks. People live. People face great obstacles and we never see if they overcome them or not. Everyone used to be a drunk, some of them find a way out, a new path to the waterfall. Love spreads as fragile as a spider web. There are great heroics in doing nothing. Just maintaining. Metaphor comes up and smacks you around the face with all the subtlety of a good blow job. There are no $5 words here, in fact I’ll pay you $10 for every $5 word you find. Themes get overused it’s true, but that’s probably partly due to the past.

“My Fathers Life” is a emotionally honest telling of growing up Carver: Small towns, small lives, small hopes, small dreams, big drinks. If Spazmo wants to say that alcoholism runs in the family, the Carver crew is a great example. Ray Sr. works hard, tries hard, drinks hard, ends up in an asylum, breaking the hearts of all around him. His son follows suit to an extent. Ray Jr. enters the apprenticeship of the alcoholic as easy as he does mundane day job passim. A house, alone, with all the drink you can drink is his ideal.

In the big picture: Ray leaves his drink, he meets the love of his life (the real one, this time), he writes his heart out as his liver gives out in time, in tune. Ray dies happy, adored. Silly little fucks like me read him over and over, our eyes always wet with tears, we wish we could write a single moment as great as he could. We read Chekhov. We read Bukowski. We read Harvey Pekar. We think about how much we drink, how hard we’ve looked for that saviour. We end up with dirty glasses.

It’s not “cool” to like Ray these days. Fuck cool.