The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Continuing my quest to read the ten books selected as the best of the year by The New York Times, I finally finished The Collected Stories, by Amy Hempel. This is a one-volume collection of her four previously published slim volumes of stories, 48 in all.

Hempel is frequently termed a minimalist, or miniaturist, in the same ballpark as Raymond Carver. It is true that her writing is spare, and the stories frequently are quite brief, most lasting no more than three or four pages. Her sentences are very well crafted (in Rick Moody's introduction, he begins and closes with "It's all about the sentences."), but they manage to pack a wallop.

Many of her stories have two concurrent themes: they are about damaged people, either in hospitals or institutions, or recovering from heartbreak, and there are also many dogs. I don't think this is coincidental. Dogs, as well as other animals, are said to provide healing qualities to people in pain. Almost all of her stories have a dog in them somewhere, either prominently featured, or just on the periphery. It is no mistake that Hempel is posing with a dog on the cover of the book.

The first volume, Reasons to Live, contains many very short stories, most no more than a page or two. This has an odd effect on this reader, sometime I felt like I had been dropped into something already happening, as if they were snippets from something larger. A couple of stories stand out: Nashville Gone to Ashes, about the widow of a veterinarian, and In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, about a woman in a hospice.

It is in the second volume, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, that the stories become more rounded. Consider The Harvest, one of the best stories in the collection. Who could resist a story that starts this way: "The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me." The story then documents a woman recovering from a car accident. Once we have learned the facts, though, Hempel takes the story on a 180 degree turn halfway through in a bit of metafiction, as the character announces that everything is a lie. It's been a while since I felt a bit of literary whiplash like that. That story is followed up by the thoroughly charming The Most Girl Part of You, about a teenage friendship that is burgeoning into romance.

The third volume, Tumble Home, is dominated by the title story, a novella and leaps and bounds the longest work of Hempel's career. It is told in epistle form, a letter written by a woman in some sort of mental institution, to a man from her past. She has an interesting menagerie of fellow patients, and alludes to her mother's suicide.

The last volume, The Dog of the Marriage, contains the most pointed story abouts dogs, the title one. In one section of the story the narrator trains seeing-eye dogs, in another she befriends a stray beagle who has been abused. There is a story called Jesus is Waiting, about a woman at loose ends who seeks comfort from non-stopping driving, always listening to Al Green singing Jesus is Waiting, and the shortest story in the whole collection, Memoir, which I can quote here in its entirety: "Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?" My favorite story is The Uninvited. A fifty-year-old woman, who may be pregnant from a rape, details the plot of the ghost film called The Uninvited. It's an effective interpolation of pop culture in a literary form.

This book took me a while to read not because I wasn't enjoying it, it's just that books of short stories are usually read by me piecemeal, a bit here, a bit there. I had the opportunity to read a few of these stories outside: Tumble Home was read sitting on a bench at the Princeton train station, and The Uninvited while in a wildlife reserve on Princeton's edge, with no sound around except for brushing leaves and birds chirping.