Michael Hartford

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”
I began. I told her her insects fly through 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.

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel’s stories are like nothing else in contemporary fiction. They are plotless, almost characterless, but rich in imagery and emotion, more in the mode of confessional poetry than fiction. The language is careful but chatty at the same time, and deceptive in its apparent honesty; the stories invite us in for an intimate talk, but push us away with undisclosed facts.

The “unreliable narrator” is typically a subtle technique: over the course of a story, we begin to suspect that the governess is seeing something other than ghosts, that the grieving husband has an ulterior motive, that . But in Amy Hempel’s stories, the narrators announce their unreliability in plain and direct language, and even warn us when they’re lying:

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going to start now to tell you what I left out of “The Harvest,” and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

The reasons that Hempel’s narrators lie are varied: to protect or deceive others or themselves, to improve the aesthetics of the story, even simple cussedness. The effect is disorienting, as layers of misdirection pile up over the course of the many short pieces in the collection. We come away from the stories slightly dizzy, a little less sure of our understanding of the world; it’s a sort of Zen enlightenment, epiphany through confusion.

Though only two of the stories are explicitly connected–the longer pieces “Tumble Home” and “Offertory” (told by the most unreliable narrator of the lot)–there are details and images that carry through: the fear of flying, the fear of earthquakes, talking monkeys, car crashes, and dogs. These motifs tie the collection together in interesting tangles; the repetition serves both to support and undercut the connections. Since the stories are so short (one only 17 words, and not quite a grammatical sentence), inviting us to read through much of the collection in a single sitting, the repeated details become blurry and sharp at the same time.

Hempel is a dangerous and daring driver on dark roads, paying little attention to traffic; keep your seat belt buckled, but trust that the ride will be an adventure.