Getting off the train

No one likes a complainer, my mother told me. Keep it quiet.

These past few weeks have gone by in a rush, minutes packed in so tight that the seams of day threaten to explode, losing my marbles in a single go. That’s how it feels. I’ve been on Projects, several of them. And the writing that goes with Projects, that field of text to straighten and make prim, the ordering of words to convey someone else’s meaning….Well, it takes the air out of what could be a beautiful sentence and impugns the word ‘sentence’ until its second and more sinister meaning floats up.

In transit, I read from a collection of Amy Hempel’s short stories, recommended by a friend who also writes fiction. (The recommendations of friends are interesting things; a door ajar, a view into the interior realm of someone you know only at a certain level. Even my oldest friends – my oldest friend in the world, for example, once recommended a book to me that turned out to be the most romantic and passionate book I have ever read. I never knew he had this kind of thing in him. It was a wonderful thing – both the book and the recommendation). So these stories by Amy Hempel. They have me puzzled. Rick Moody introduces the book and his introduction is written with the faint rhythms of Hempel’s stories. He talks about rhythm and ambiguity. He talks about yearning. He talks about wit. It’s hard not to fall in line with her metronome. I find myself doing it here. Right here.

Reading Hempel’s stories is, in some ways, like opening a window. There is so much room in those stories (ambiguity, check). And at the end of a long day of technical writing, the air in those stories is curative. Yet despite the air in Hempel’s world, the rhythm of her prose, and a long-held admiration for the style of like-minimalist Raymond Carver, I find that I do not enjoy these stories. I admire these stories but there is something about them, the wry and the sigh in these lines, that makes me think, no. The stories themselves are not airy – they are solid, muscular things. Some of her stories (Nashville Gone to Ashes) are wrenching because of how exquisitely Hempel can capture the way things are not. These stories are studied reflection in what things aren't. There is desperation in that and yearning, okay, but the yearning is the sort that is chronic and sad. On what could be, the characters keep quiet. Hempel’s narrator (always first person) is inevitably limited but the stories go on to nod aren’t we all. And there is something about this kind of gesture, a gesture that Moody calls heroic, that fits me like a straightjacket.

There is a scene in which a bridesmaid watches the bride’s dog bound into a room, wagging its tail with unbridled devotion. The scene unfolds: ‘“I used to think I wanted to be loved like that,” I said. “But I don’t want to be loved like that.” [To which the bride asks] “Would it help if you thought it was insincere?”’ And then the bride goes away for a photo in which she looks beautiful and then bridesmaid and bride sigh together over a shared joke.

I always thought that evocation was the most affecting strategy. Hempel’s stories show the wide spaces ambiguity can make as well as the dead ends. She makes even the dead ends the perfect shape of a story. Her writing is filled with little U-turns. It’s not a rhythm I buy totally. And it makes me wonder what it says that the tiny musculature of some these stories make me feel hard pressed. I want to excuse myself or protest. I want to get in those pages and shake Jean or Big Boy or Terry by the shoulders! Come on! I want to say. Complain for goodness sake, complain out loud and change course!

The book carries a dominant song – the shrug of which I’ve just described – but the stories excerpted from the section Tumble Home have a distinctively different ring. They are not as tight as the earlier stories, the characters move in a less controlled climate. The beginning of Tumble Home, the title story, stopped me dead. It opens:

“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?...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…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.”

I was credulous then (as the narrator permitted herself the power to lie). But the feeling did not last much past the turn of the page. So I closed the book early because my stop was coming up and I wanted to get off the train.