The collected short stories (her 4 books, 400 pages) of an author whose work I've wanted to read for a while. Here's a sample (the narrator's a widow, Nashville's a dog)
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Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own. Cold nights I pull his socks on over my hands. I read in his bed. People still write from when Flea had his column. He did a pet Q and A for the newspaper. The new doctor sends along letters for my amusement. Here's one I liked - a man thinks his cat is homosexual. The letter begins, "My cat Frank (not his real name) ..." In addition to Flea's socks, I also wear his watch. It's the way we tell each other. At bedtime, I think how Nashville slept with Flea. She must have felt to him like a sack of antlers. I read about a marriage breaking up because the man let his Afghan sleep in the marriage bed. I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed - not sex - but sex was how we got there. (p.21) |
It's fast, with jokes and feeling. Names mentioned in the introduction came to my name too - the wit of Lorrie Moore, the concision of Lydia Davis (some of Hempel's pieces are a page long, a few are much shorter). Or how about this, from "Going" -
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In the desert I like to drive through binoculars. What I like about it is that things are two ways at once. Things are far away and close with you still in the same place. In the ditch, things were also two ways at once. The air was unbelievably hot and my skin was unbelievably cold. "Son," the doctor said, "you shouldn't be alive." ... this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she in love with the Lord. But she's a sport, this nurse. When I can't sleep she brings in the telephone book. She sits by my bed and we look up funny names. Calliope Ziss and Maurice Pancake live in this very community. I like a woman in my room at night. The night nurse smells like a Christmas candle. |
But sometimes a story looks as if it's been cobbled together hopefully from jottings in her notebooks. Maybe she watches QI. In "Murder" for example there are quirky details, but do they add up?
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The bartender also has a crush on Sister Marianne, the former nun who moved to Phoenix for her health, then moved right back when she heard that the tarantulas there can jump eight feet, that some of them have landed on the saddle of a horse.
Sister Marianne, when her mind is someplace else, is not aware of the sound she makes there sitting at the bar - like a sprinkler kicker head going kk-kk-kk-kk-shooshooshooshooshoo. Sister has her eye on the fellow from the post office. When you buy a sheet of stamps from him, he rubs the gluey side of the sheet across his hair. He says that the oil from human hair will keep the stamps from sticking to one another in your purse. |
"Tumble home" is a novella of about 70 pages. The material is similar in style to the other pieces (indeed, at least two paragraphs are straight copies). The narrator is institutionalised, with time to write letters to a "you"
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I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the written tradition is: Put your cards on the table. This is easier, I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less - not more - careful. We can say everything. Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. Having delivered myself of the manly analogy, I see it to be not a failure, but a lie. How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you. These sounds - this letter - it is my lipstick, my lingerie, my high heels. Writing to you fills the days in this place. And sometimes I long for days when nothing happens. "Not every clocktick needs a martyr." The trees are all on crutches, on sawed-off braces of deadwood notched into Y-shaped crooks for support. The birds that nest in these crippled trees line their nests with the clumps of fur that come loose to float over brambled grass when the house cat is groomed outdoors. |
In "At the gates of the animal kingdom" Mrs Carlin has an animal fact for every occasion - a story I suspect the author found easy to write.
I enjoyed many passages in the book, e.g.
- Jean was trying to describe what she felt it would be like to be married to Larry; she said it would be like staying in a bad hotel and being forced to send postcards of it to your friends with arrows pointing to "my room." (p.147)
- He thought that travelling alone was like being in therapy - the things you found out about yourself (p.209)
- They look like a gift from someone who likes me but doesn't know me very well (p.249)
- I was playing Scrabble with Karen. I saw that I could close the space in DE-Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? (p.262 and elsewhere)
- The pills that she swallowed were mine. They were pills prescribed to me because I couldn't sleep. With as much thoughtfulness as she showed in her life, she left one behind in the vial. Presumably, it would be hard for me to sleep the night we found her (p.276)
- Often, after an intimate visit, a man will pick a fight. ... To separate himself, to keep from being pulled in. I have learned to head this off. I find an excuse to take myself away (p.276)
- I am like those people who hold grudges for what someone has done to them in a dream (p.283)
- The dog had been our second choice. My husband wanted the pretty one and I had wanted to keep the runt. But we each picked the same runner-up. (p.361)
In the notes to the stories she points out the source of some of these phrases.
A reviewer described her as a writer's writer. I can see why. For a start, there's the brevity of her pieces. Also I suspect that writers are more impressed by the good fragments and less disappointed by the final effect than readers are. My favourite pieces are "San Francisco", "In the cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried", "Weekend", "The Uninvited" and maybe "Offertory". I didn't get "Housewife".
Other reviews
- Patrick Ness (Hempel puts together sentences and paragraphs of idiosyncratic beauty and unnerving precision. The opening of the title story reads: "On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet. We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater. I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog's head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. 'Because he can hear high notes we can't?' my husband said. 'No,' I said, 'because he was disappointed in the choreography.'" Here is an entire relationship in 95 words, delivered with such fluid efficiency that it should be required reading for every creative writing course the world over.)
- D.T. Max (Dogs appear everywhere in Hempel's fiction, gentle, intuitive counterparts to our neurotic selves)
- Peter D. Kramer (her interest is in the women who allow those predators and narcissists to injure them)
- Catherine Taylor (the voice in each tale – sometimes no more than a paragraph long – is generally that of a woman, sardonic, disaffected, lived in and lived through, often finding herself in blackly comic situations with neighbours, parents, in cars, and hospitals; always at the fag-end of a relationship.)
- Owen King ("Al Jolson..." is a devastating work of fiction. Hempel's story of two friends, one terminal and hospital-bound, the other come to comfort her, is a model of economy. In fewer than 5,000 words, Hempel manages to develop a friendship and a situation that is as complex and real as anything that fiction can hope to produce. ... [this book] rises only occasionally to the heights of that early story ... While Hempel is an extraordinary stylist, she often shows a depressing disinterest in narrative. ... The next two collections in the volume , "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom" and "Tumble Home," are shot through with similar flat notes, characters in search of stories. ... the patience of those who find their way to her latest collection, "The Dog of the Marriage," will be rewarded. Here, Hempel has come almost all the way back to the balance of character and story that made "Al Jolson" so affecting.)
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