Books: More from a Master

That opinion rests on the premise that the stories Carver published without Lish's oversight were inferior to the radically trimmed ones, and not many people believe that. Fresh evidence to the contrary can now be found in Call If You Need Me (Vintage; 300 pages; $13), a gathering of the author's previously uncollected nonfiction, plus five unpublished short stories. Three of them were found by the poet Tess Gallagher, Carver's companion for the last decade of his life and wife for his last few months, in the home they shared at Port Angeles, Wash.; the other two turned up among Carver's papers at Ohio State University. In a foreword, Gallagher notes that she had reservations about making public stories that her late husband had not finished to his satisfaction: "Ray would sometimes take a story through 30 rewrites. These stories had been put aside well before that."

But she decided that the discovered works were good enough to publish, and she was right. Even though they were not polished to the extent the author probably intended, these five stories are set unmistakably in Carver country and populated by Carver people. The heroes have quit drinking, as Carver did in 1977. Marriages are tense or broken. In Kindling, a man named Myers has just gotten out of an alcohol rehab center and can't go home again because his wife "had a lawyer and a restraining order." So he rents a room in another town and winds up voluntarily chopping a load of firewood for his landlord. In What Would You Like to See?, a married couple have agreed to split up. Before they vacate the house they have rented all summer, they are invited to a farewell dinner by their landlord and his wife, who believe they are moving on together. After the meal, the host and hostess show slides from their travels. Summaries of these and the other three stories would suggest that nothing much happens. Yet to read the works themselves is to experience vividly the tectonic shiftings and rumblings and reknittings that go on beneath the surface of everyday lives. There was truly nothing minimal about the reach and grasp of Carver's art.