{"id":134970,"date":"2019-03-27T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134970"},"modified":"2019-03-27T17:33:21","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T21:33:21","slug":"nothing-is-like-anything-else-on-amy-hempel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/nothing-is-like-anything-else-on-amy-hempel\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Is Like Anything Else: On Amy Hempel"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week marks the release of Amy Hempel\u2019s <\/em>Sing to It, her first book in over a decade.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the first story I submitted to a writing workshop, I included, in my naive twenty-something state, a scene in which a male and female character get close following a party. The manuscript was a mess of overly florid metaphors, and it included the following sentence: \u201cHe touched her arm lightly.\u201d The class\u2019s teacher, the short-fiction writer Amy Hempel, gave it back to me swimming in black ink and annotations. \u201cTouching isn\u2019t cheap,\u201d she offered gently, in response to my clunky familiarities. On the question of the metaphors she was bolder: \u201cNothing\u2019s like anything else,\u201d she suggested to the group.<\/p>\n

Nothing\u2019s like anything else. Hempel\u2019s prose is so blanched of needless embellishment that it can take on the corrosive sting of disinfectant. It refuses to accommodate comfort, or the familiar narratives we use to buffer our existences\u2014\u201cthe stories we tell ourselves in order to live.\u201d And yet, not cold, it brims with earthy, prosaic humor. Hempel\u2019s comedy is the kind derived from finding typos on hospital menus or taking detours to IKEA<\/small> stores.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Amy Hempel\u2019s own first short story, \u201cIn the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,\u201d was the product of a writing class she took with Gordon Lish, the iconic editor of Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, and Christine Schutt. Lish had asked his students to write the story that would most \u201cdismantle\u201d their sense of self; \u201cAl Jolson,\u201d an unsentimental portrayal of a dear friend dying too young, was Hempel\u2019s response. What emerges is the outline of a voice cratered and undone by loss, a voice in withdrawal. It is a voice haloed by omissions and wide margins, by white space on the page.<\/p>\n

Though white space has become something of a literary fetish, Hempel\u2019s practice of retention is unmotivated by the glittering appeal of cool. Her ellipses are elegant, yet also somehow generous: she always presumes the reader \u201cis dying to get away\u201d from her, as she notes in her interview with T<\/em>he Paris Review<\/em>. The lines which are permitted to appear are often devoted to dogs (a Hempel staple), minor encounters, and quotidian events such as barbecues and children\u2019s birthday parties\u2014the \u201cblessings of dailiness,\u201d as she puts it in her 1997 novella Tumble Home. <\/em>Her broader interests are in off-pitch, off-kilter, imperfect voices: those which falter at the edge of phatic, empty language or small talk. \u201cYou want to be underneath the bleachers in a story,\u201d she told the class. \u201cLooking for what\u2019s left.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her 2005 story collection The Dog of the Marriage<\/em>, this offstage writing persona is exercised in pieces such as \u201cBeach Town,\u201d where the narrator observes a disintegrating marriage through the white pine fence of a couple\u2019s vacation house, or \u201cThe Afterlife,\u201d in which a daughter watches her father start dating again after her mother\u2019s death: \u201cWhat he inhabited now was a kind of afterlife: not dead, but not alive to possibility.\u201d Hempel possesses a quiet knowledge that so few writers\u2014particularly in these times of restless self-promotion\u2014understand: the most interesting material happens to the side of the ego\u2019s orbit, rather than within its furnace.<\/p>\n

Though they are not cushioned by the bolsters that typically comprise identity\u2014names, ages, and sometimes even gender\u2014Hempel\u2019s narrators are alive. They are restless and imperfect. They are given to long, aimless drives; sudden moves across the country; and fractured love affairs. In \u201cOffertory,\u201d the opening line is as sexy as it is elusive: \u201cWe did it twelve times\u2014made love, all of us, to one another twelve times, the two of them doing everything two people could do to me twelve times.\u201d The narrator\u2019s lover\u2014an older, successful male artist, who also appears enigmatically in Tumble Home<\/em>\u2014becomes obsessed with her (brief) past history with women, and insists she showcase every detail for him: \u201cThe rule was I had to tell him the truth, and I had to tell him everything.\u201d Such a dynamic starts to wear on the narrator, permitting Hempel to suggest that sometimes telling the whole story is neither an interesting, nor particularly altruistic, act. The refusal of metaphor here becomes an ethical, rather than aesthetic choice: to superimpose one singular experience over another might be to bludgeon both with the violence of comparison.<\/p>\n

On the clumsy manuscript where I had made efforts to distill the waning end of an affair, Hempel recommended that I read Lydia Davis\u2019s standout novel in the genre, The End of the Story<\/em>. Davis\u2019s work overlaps with Hempel\u2019s in its acidity, and, in Rick Moody\u2019s words, \u201chaiku-like compaction.\u201d Davis is seen as the foremost living practitioner of the challenging \u201cone-sentence story,\u201d though some of Hempel\u2019s are so finely calibrated as to stun. \u201cMemoir,\u201d also from The Dog of the Marriage<\/em>, is possibly her most notorious (the full sum of the story is: \u201cJust once in my life\u2014oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?\u201d)<\/p>\n

This week sees the publication of Hempel\u2019s Sing to It<\/em>, her first book in over a decade (in 2006, her stories were anthologized in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel<\/em>). The prepositional to<\/em>, embedded in the title, already feels significant. While her stories radiate with emptiness, they do not take place in a vacuum. There is always an address, somebody to whom the writing is directed. \u00a0The title piece, which echoes the premise of \u201cAl Jolson,\u201d a narrator trying to comfort a dying friend, displays both the banality and the transcendence of the \u201cend\u201d in under two hundred words of stirring, rhythmic verse. \u201cCloudland,\u201d <\/em>which, at sixty-two pages, is closer to a novella, follows a woman who, as a teenager, surrendered her child to adoption: \u201cIt\u2019s been how many years, and I see her\u2014the girl I never saw\u2014wherever I go. I never made a list, and don\u2019t keep count of the number of times I see her. But man, she gets around.\u201d \u201cA Full Service Shelter,\u201d displacing Hempel\u2019s usual penchant for the first person, is composed from the perspective of neglected dogs about to be put down in animal shelters.<\/p>\n

Such stories continue Hempel\u2019s career-long excavation of the blunt brutalities of intimacy, but they also show how, through language, we find glimmers of connection. Touching isn\u2019t cheap. Sometimes all that\u2019s possible is a gesture in intimacy\u2019s vague direction. In that grasping, space is made between the subjects and the objects of a sentence. Sharper truths are chiseled. And there is no fumbling.<\/p>\n

Alice Blackhurst is a writer and research fellow at Cambridge University. She studied fiction writing with Amy Hempel at Harvard in 2011.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never use metaphors, and other lessons learned in a fiction-writing class with Amy Hempel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1729,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[12223,2282,51584,576,51585,51586,51587],"class_list":["post-134970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-amy-hempel","tag-gordon-lish","tag-in-the-cemetery-where-al-jonson-is-buried","tag-lydia-davis","tag-sing-to-it","tag-the-dog-of-the-marriage","tag-writing-lessons"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNothing Is Like Anything Else: On Amy Hempel by Alice Blackhurst<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Never use metaphors, and other lessons learned in a fiction-writing class with Amy Hempel.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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