Extract

A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

A blind man comes to dinner and the narrator, half-drunk and resentful, cannot fathom why his wife cares for this visitor. Raymond Carver published this story in 1983, and in its plainspoken, suspicious voice created one of fiction's most quietly devastating transformations. The narrator is sealed inside himself, anesthetized by television and marijuana and a hostility he barely recognizes as loneliness. Then the blind man asks him to draw a cathedral, guiding his hand, and something cracks open. Carver, who stripped American fiction to its bones, here allowed grace through the simplest door: two hands moving together across a paper bag. The narrator closes his eyes and is, for once, inside something larger.