Once upon a time I didn’t enjoy short stories. It was laziness and something else: despite an extensive literary education (English
literature degree, creative writing MFA, library job, books for
breakfast) I had never learned how to read a short story for anything other
than plot. Reading Amy Hempel’s short stories has changed that.
They are short, sometimes very short, and at the end of each I have to pause to
take in what I’ve read, and usually read them again. The meaning isn’t always
apparent, so I read slowly, absorbing every sentence, every word, to pick up
the nuances. I'm a beginner again, feeling my way. I’m not page turning to find out ‘what next?’ Reading these short
stories is more like contemplating a poem.
This sounds dull. But Hempel’s
writing isn’t at all. Her voice has “something to do with stand-up comedy,
contemporary poetry, celebrity magazines, visual arts, the West, and the
popular song” according to Rick Moody in his essay 'On Amy Hempel'. One-liners,
references to pop and celebrity culture, the shallow side of California: all
those things I love. But it is necessary to pay attention, particularly at the beginning of Hempel’s
stories: there’s no traditional set up, no gentle easing into a scene. ‘Today Will Be A Quiet Day’,
from her first collection Reasons To Live propels the reader
straight in with a disagreement:
“I think it’s the other way round,” the boy said.
How’s that for a first line? We’re given information that is
partial at best. No name, no indication of what the boy is talking about, no
setting. What this does is force us to read the next line to orient ourselves
as readers. What is the other way
round?
“I think it’s the
other way round,” the boy said. “I think if the quake hit now the bridge would collapse and the ramps would be left.”
Ah. So we’ve entered this story half way through an argument about the effect of an earthquake on a bridge. But it would be tedious to read a
repeated line, so Hempel omits it.
Hempel’s stories seem as pared down as possible – like poetry - giving the reader only what is absolutely
essential for the story. She’s a slow writer (four short story collections in
twenty years) – but I like to think she’s spending her time cutting, honing and
polishing her sentences until they are as minimal as they can possibly be. Hempel just drip feeds the reader what they
need to keep reading, to build up a picture of what’s going on. The next
sentence tells us who the boy is arguing with:
He looked at his sister with satisfaction.
OK, so this is a brother and sister arguing. What’s more the
boy is enjoying the argument – we can tell by the word “satisfaction”. Now a third character jumps in:
“You are just trying to scare your sister,” the father said.
“You know that is not true.”
“No, really,” the boy insisted, “and I heard birds in the
middle of the night. Isn’t that a warning?”
We’re eight lines in, and though we have no names, no time of day, no
descriptions of what the characters look like, we do know there are three people in the scene: a father and two kids, and we can tell quite a bit about
this family’s dynamics, which is what the story is about, plus we have a tone of
voice: annoying younger brother, a father who is trying to be authoritative. The boy is needling his sister – and
the father knows he’s doing this on purpose: we suspect in fact that
he’s quite enjoying it. We don’t know where they are yet: they could be together watching something
about earthquakes on TV (though why would that scare the sister?) or perhaps
they are on the bridge itself. The next two lines give us the information we need:
The girl gave her brother a toxic look and ate a handful of
Raisinets. The three of them were stalled in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Finally the setting is revealed: they’re in a car on the bridge. We can go
back and read the opening again, with more understanding, and this time round, can hear the needling tone of the younger brother, sense the girl’s
mood.
Tempting as it is to do line-by-line analysis of the whole
story, I’d rather you read the story for yourself. The other thing I particularly noticed in this story is Hempel’s wonderful ear
for banter between children: this story teems with the sort of talk that
parents/adults tune out. But it’s not saccharine or
cute in any way – it’s well observed, well listened to, which saves it from
being sappy:
“Can I have one?” the boy asked, meaning the Raisinets.
“No,” his sister said.
“Can I have two?”
“Neither of you should be eating candy before lunch,” the
father said. He said it with the good sport of a father who enjoys his kids and
gets a kick out of saying Dad things.
The dialogue is very much on the surface: it
crackles with corny jokes, family sayings and wisecracks – which a) is fun to
read and b) tells us so much about these three characters and the levels of
comfort and discomfort they have with each other.
The reason the three of them are on a daytrip in
the car together is that the father wants to check that they are OK after one
of the son’s friends committed suicide. It would be so tempting as a writer to
slip in some heavy conversation, a leaden “on the nose” question: “How are you feeling son?” “I hurt
so much dad.” But people rarely speak like that: how much more often do we
sidle up to the real subject by talking about something else? Or argue
passionately about things that don’t matter at all, while leaving important
things unsaid? So why shouldn’t characters in fiction do that too? The clever
thing about this story is that the superficial dialogue – the squabbling and
joke telling - is all the father needs to understand exactly how his children
are doing.
