The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Miriam Toews Reads Raymond Carver

December 1, 2025·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

The narrator walks to work on a summer morning, wishing good luck to every person he has been supporting — 'God love her and keep her' — then raises his arms like a goof in an empty parking lot.

1. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features Miriam Toews reading and discussing 'Elephant' by Raymond Carver, which appeared in the New Yorker in June 1986. 2. Deborah Treisman hosts as fiction editor; Miriam Toews, author of ten books including Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, is the guest reader. 3. The episode's core question is how Carver creates a credible shift toward grace in a story where the narrator's circumstances remain entirely unchanged. 4. Toews says she read Carver's stories as a teenager and young parent who was broke and thinking about becoming a writer, feeling she and Carver 'kind of had the similar life.' 5. Toews notes that 'Elephant,' written close to Carver's death in 1988, has a looser quality than his earlier minimalist work in Cathedral, with more room for repetition and feeling. 6. The story opens with the narrator sending $500 to his brother in California, who promises to repay in February via a tax refund and a vague 'little investment.' 7. The brother gives $50 or $75 of the money to the narrator's mother instead of the agreed-upon amount, leaving the narrator to keep supporting her regardless. 8. The narrator also supports a daughter in Bellingham living with an unemployed man, sending money monthly while she describes her kids drawing pictures of a motel swimming pool and promises her luck will change in summer. 9. His son at a college in New Hampshire borrows to fund a junior year in Germany, then threatens to deal drugs or rob a bank when the narrator stops paying, before following up to say he is allergic to cocaine — 'it made his eyes stream' — and will hang himself instead. 10. His former wife says nothing; she simply knows her payment will arrive on the first of each month regardless. 11. The narrator takes out a loan to cover all his obligations, stops eating out, can't afford new shoes, and periodically writes letters threatening to move to Australia. 12. Two dreams arrive in the same night: one in which his father carries him on his shoulders like an elephant and he lets go because the grip on his ankles is secure; one in which he kicks out a car window and someone offers him whiskey, which he drinks — 'that was rock bottom.' 13. The narrator wakes, makes coffee, and laughs out loud at his own Australia threats — 'Ha ha ha. As if I'd read somewhere how to laugh.' 14. He walks to work on a summer morning, decides not to lock the door, and cycles through each family member with genuine warmth: 'God love her and keep her' for his daughter, 'Good luck to you, too, brother' for his brother. 15. He stands in an empty parking lot with his arms raised 'like a goof' until a coworker named George pulls over, and George floors the car toward the mountains with the windows howling. 16. In the post-reading discussion, Toews says the story is almost impossible to summarize because the change at the end is entirely internal — 'there's no change in the situation or the plot.' 17. Toews frames the ending as 'a fleeting moment of freedom' that Carver shows always has a cost, linking the image of George's 'big, unpaid-for car' to the story's ongoing theme of borrowed time. 18. The discussion tone is warm and exploratory; Toews speculates openly and Treisman asks precise structural questions about what holds the story together. 19. Listeners interested in late Carver, in how short fiction achieves emotional release without plot resolution, or in an author discussing personal identification with a writer's life will find the episode engaging. 20. Listeners expecting a plot-driven story or a more critical or academic analysis may find the discussion too impressionistic.

As heard by us

A spare Carver reading about money, family, and the exhausting pull of being someone's last hope.

Raymond Carver's "Elephant" comes through here as a story of family duty tightening into financial strain. Deborah Treisman introduces the 1986 New Yorker story, chosen by Miriam Toews, whose early encounters with Carver came when she was young, broke, and beginning to imagine…

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