it didn't take me long to finish the author's first collection of short stories. most of the stories are only a few pages long--one in this collection is a mere page and a half. hempel is known for her lightning-quick prose and sentences so fecund with wit and raw emotion that an entire paragraph is a story in itself.
that said, i'm not sure i liked it. in fact, the first story i read kind of annoyed me. i wanted to read "in the cemetary where al jolson is buried" first because of its legendary status as the story that made her gordon lish's darling when she was a student at columbia. it's also the first fiction story she ever wrote (maybe that's why it annoys me, hah).
of course, the beginning is amazing:
"'tell me things i won't mind forgetting,' she said. 'make it useless stuff or skip it.'
I began. I told her insects fly through the rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana-- you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on."
it's clear that hempel is an extremely effective writer in that she knows exactly what she wants to communicate and she knows exactly how to communicate it. everything else is unnecessary bullshit. all this time i thought raymond carver was bare bones. i believe it was truman capote who said he believes in the scissors more than the pencil. perhaps that is hempel's credo. it's clear that she wants to push the boundaries of what a short story is and what the form is capable of, which i can appreciate. hempel creates compelling characters in stories such as "nashville gone to ashes" and "tonight is a favor to holly" but the stories end before i can establish a connection to them. i found it a bit anticlimactic.
that said, i believe she's an amazing writer. you'd find more talent in her index finger than ten fiction bookshelves in barnes and noble. it's obvious that the publishing world loves lady hempel, that her vision of the short story is nothing short of literary genius. a quick google search and you'll find nothing but laudatory articles and interviews celebrating her. not to mention at nearly 60 years old, she's a babe. if the interviewer is male, you can almost see the blush rising in his cheeks as he conducts the interview. more power to her.
but the fact that her very first attempt at fiction was so groundbreaking and well-received makes me think that her technique comes out so perfectly organic in her writing. she can pop out a couple pages and it's all the rage in the next harper's. it kind of usurps this indelible image in my head of writers toiling away in dark rooms, writing and tossing out material, then revising and writing some more. she says in her interview with powell's after a question about what kind of writing she would consider a weakness:
"I don't know that I'm not good at as much as I'm not interested in the big picture in any given story. I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself."
i don't really understand that logic, but her choice in not writing longer fiction is interesting. not that i think short fiction is easy in the least, but i get the sense that short fiction comes rather naturally to her. this talent has afforded her a career as a professional writer and educator at some of the best writing programs in the country. but i wonder what would happen if she took a stab at writing something longer than a novella. something out of her comfort zone. it seems like she has carved out this niche in short fiction and is one of the most successful modern writers because of it. she knows what she is good at. she has her formula and doesn't monkey with it. is that any different from the mass market romance and mystery authors who find their formula and write the same story over and over again? aren't writers of literary fiction supposed to challenge themselves as artists?
clearly, this is a tangent and i come off naive. that's fair. what do i know? with my drawerful of unpublished short stories and a book that needs serious editing, i really shouldn't be talking. most of what draws people to a certain author or type of fiction is so nebulous, it's not even worth going into. all i'm saying is that this reader would love to read an amy hempel novel someday. this reader thinks she should take a crack at it.
