If I could die and come back again I’d want to be reincarnated as Amy Hempel. That’s how much I revere the experimental short story writer whose new collection, Sing to It, is reviewed by James Wood in the current New Yorker. If you are uninterested in minimalist fiction, don’t bother. But if you (like me) think Brevity is the Soul of Wit, then you can read the full text of Wood’s review here. Or, read on – if you dare.
(Hempel and dogs go together like Flannery O’Connor and God.)
Any reviewer who can weave together a parenthetical reference like the one above is OK by me. And anyone (see below) who gives pride of place to what I consider Hempel’s best story – also her first – has got my full attention.
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” which appeared in Hempel’s first book, probably remains her most celebrated piece of writing. It is a painful and acutely witty tribute to a young friend who died of leukemia. From a hospital bed in California, the friend asks the narrator to entertain her with some tales, but things she won’t mind forgetting: “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”
So the narrator delivers a mashup of absurdist nonsense. That Tammy Wynette has changed the title of her song to “Stand by Your Friends.” Or crazy stuff from the newspaper about a man robbing a bank with a chicken. Meanwhile, the beloved friend, who possesses all the wit of the best Hempel characters, issues quizzical and brilliant observations from her bed: She wonders why Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of dying omit “Resurrection.” She sends the narrator to the hospital shop and asks her to bring anything back — except a magazine subscription.
And of course let’s not omit the heart-rending coda – delivered in sign language by a bereaved chimpanzee. But if you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil it for you: Hempel’s classic debut 1985 collection is called Reasons to Live.
********
To have waited over a decade for some new output from Hempel is, strangely, not all that surprising. She never was one to crank out the same story over and over, as is the habit of some. Likewise, word-count is of little concern to her. Stories in the new collection range from almost poem-like (under 100 words), to almost-novella-length (61 pages). As the New Yorker review points out, the point for Hempel has always been about quality, not quantity:
In “Offertory,” … the narrator remarks despairingly, “He said he wanted to see everything, but did he, really? Does a person want to know the thing he is asking you to tell him?” These lines seem central to Amy Hempel’s work. We flinch from the truth, we take up convenient and fantastical fictive embroidery to avoid its dangers. But we also write stories to enable us to survive the truth, to sing to it and of it. The secret is in the quality of the song.