Hempel’s great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally...
The first collection in more than a decade from Hempel offers a dizzying array of short fiction held together by the unmistakable textures of her voice.
Hempel is often called a minimalist, and that aesthetic is very much in evidence here. Of the 15 stories, 10 are two pages or shorter in length, but if you think this means they’re slight, you’ll want to think again. Rather, Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss. “At the end, he said, No metaphors!” she writes in the title story. “…So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. My arms the trees.” The effect is to articulate an idea and then to illustrate it simultaneously. “That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over,” she opens “The Quiet Car,” reminding us that all stories begin in the middle, with the characters’ lives already underway. And yet, for all the succinct deftness of these shorter pieces, it is in the collection’s longer entries that Hempel’s vision takes full shape. The remarkable “A Full-Service Shelter,” inspired by her longtime animal advocacy, uses a repeating structure—each paragraph begins with a variation of the phrase “They knew us as the ones”—to draw us into the futility and necessity of caring for dogs who have been abandoned, a tension that animates the narrative. “Greed” traces a wife’s simmering vengeance against the older woman who is sleeping with her husband; the interloper is appropriately named “Mrs. Greed.” Then, there’s Cloudland, a novella that fills much of the second half of the book, the saga of a disgraced private school teacher doing home-care work in Florida who gave up for adoption the child she bore at 18. Constructed as a collection of fragments, the narrative circles itself, moving back and forth in time and often leaving the most important details unshared. The brilliance of the writing, however, resides in the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her narrator’s reticence, teaching us to read between the lines. “I remember thinking,” she writes: “There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong.”
Hempel’s great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally reckon with themselves.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0911-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PROFILES
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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