Amy Hempel

Well, I may only be half way through ‘The Dog Of The Marriage’ but I think i’m already in love. I guess newspaper reviews would say things like ‘for fans of Raymond Carver et al’ and they wouldn’t be wrong… it’s just that for me Hempel has something a little different about her. The foci of her stories are pretty much the same - moments of personal revelation and tragedy - but they often orientate themselves towards a more, shall we say, middle class  set of sensibilities than the majority of so-called ‘dirty realism’. We’re privy to the tiniest details of the lives of health professionals and full-time beach dwellers, but the probelms which plague these characters - loss, illness, despair, uncertainty about the future - are the same as those which dog Carver’s waitresses and postal workers. There’s something a bit Lynchian about it all to be honest. Not in a surreal way, more in a debunking-of-the-middle-class-suburban-myth kind of way. I’ve laughed out loud at a couple of points too, something which up until now I thought it was only possible for F. Scott Fitzgerald to induce. Many of the stories have a rather fragmentary feel about them which means it’s pretty tough to identify what they’re actually about, but despite this one thing that strikes me is how streamlined her prose stlye is. It’s a little annoying that I’ve come to this writer so late (that’s been happening a lot recently… I only just got my first John Cheever collection this week!). Many short story writers will be able to learn a fair amount from Hempel I think, and I certainly think that if I’d have come across her earlier I wouldn’t have had such a tough time with some of last year’s work.

Thus far then, a positive experience all round. ‘The Dog Of The Marriage is available from Quercus Fiction (ISBN 978-1-84724-132-2) For a more detailed review go here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview36

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Have a lovely Sunday all.