“It’s always been the case since the first story I ever wrote. I don’t know how it’s going to get there, but I seem to need the destination,” she said in an interview with The Atlantic.
Hempel’s first story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is among the most anthologized and one of the finest works of contemporary short fiction. [break] First published in her debut collection “Reasons to Live,” it explores a complex friendship of two people in a hospital: one healthy, the other dying.
Hempel has since produced three short story collections and a novella. Her “Collected Stories” include all of her works in the order they appeared: Reasons to Live, At the Gates of Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dogs of Marriage.
Collected Stories includes an introduction by novelist Rick Moody, who says, “It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs.”
Indeed, a first-time Hempel reader will be stricken by the beauty and precision of her sentences, the manner in which they say so much by saying so little. Unlike Raymond Carver’s minimalist language, Hempel’s is often expansive in its minimalism if that can be considered possible. Reviewers labeled her as “miniaturist,” which seems more appropriate. Her sentences move swiftly from one idea to another intelligently and elegantly. Here are a few of Hempl’s first lines:
• My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had. (In A Tub)
• The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me. (The Harvest)
• The first three days are the worst, they say, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m still waiting for those first three days to be over. (Du Jour)
• I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. (Tumble Home)
• A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o’clock, I am not going to answer the door. (Tonight is a Favor to Holly)
The concentration of Hempel’s sentences demand slow-reading time: Time to read, reread, marvel and savor. Some of the sentences demand you linger on it for a few minutes, some might prompt you take a walk and return. The sentences are polished, brilliant and complete.
However, the danger of such concentrated sentences is the lack of interest in plot and structure, and the challenge of engaging the reader in longer works. Many stories in At the Gates of Animal Kingdom delve too far into sharp wit and dialogue, thereby losing focus and the reader’s interest. This floating feeling of having a story suspended in unidentified space/time, and with no sense of urgency, can easily tire a reader when it comes to Hempel’s novella, Tumble Home. Some of the impressive qualities of Reasons to Live resurface in The Dogs of Marriage and wind into The Offertory.
Among the most striking characteristics of Hempel’s writing is her ability to use animals vividly as background to support her characters. She has had dogs, cats, snakes, chimps, birds, and other animals that appear throughout the collection. Hempel herself is a dog lover who trains guide dogs for blind people. She also edited Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs, with Jim Shepherd.
And Hempel is many other things besides a writer. She returned to college to study forensics, psychology, and criminology and does not consider writing her primary vocation. She first explored fiction in Gordon Lish’s workshop, and many critics attribute her minimalist bent and sharp language as a heavy Lish influence. She is often called his golden child; her first book Reasons to Live was dedicated to Lish. But toward the end of the Collected Stories, it is evident that Hempel is breaking away from the set sharpness and brilliance of her sentences to a slower, more patient voice.
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