AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM: Stories

by Amy Hempel ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 1990

Another slim collection of stories--many of which have appeared in fashionable mags (Vanity Fair, Grand Street, The Quarterly)--by the author of Reasons to Live (1985), with mostly the same concerns: faithless men, difficult families, and trusty animals--the last of which often consoles the nervous female narrators. These precious little fictions, deliberately ""cut off from meaning and completion,"" whine and moan with lots of unearned (i.e., unconvincing) world-weariness. In ""Du Jour,"" a recovering nicotine addict complains about life being tough; in ""Murder,"" two bridesmaids speak of the woe that is marriage; in ""The Day I Had Everything,"" the members of a cancer support group gripe about men; and in ""Tom-Rock Through the Eels,"" the narrator, traveling home after her mother's suicide, ironically lists all the generic Good Times with Mothers she's ever heard about from friends. Fate, in Hempel's attenuated point of view, is cruel and capricious, depriving women of husbands had (""Daylight Come"") and to be (""Rapture of the Deep""). Other things also weigh heavily on these femme fatale narrators: a fear of flying (""To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O'Hare""); the stirrings of adolescent lust (""The Most Girl Part of You""); the litany of weird and depressing facts and anecdotes collected in ""And Lead Us Not Into Penn Station""; and the burdensome demands of fiction-writing (""The Harvest""). The briefest of the pieces, ""In the Animal Shelter,"" imparts the tiny insight that beautiful women abandoned by men seek emotional revenge by giving stray animals false hope of a new home. The title story finds an old woman literally scared to death by her visions of animal abuse. After all, we learn in ""The Center,"" man and beast once shared Edenic harmony, which was far better than the bourgeois summer idyll of ""The Rest of God,"" with its intimations of domestic banality. Frail fictions that suffer from their incessant girlish pangs and womanly aches--touch them and they bleed; squeeze and there's nothing left.

Pub Date: March 16, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION