My watching whatever Warren is watching is overcompensation for Chatty telling Warren what I said about his habits-that he watches too much, and what he watches is dumb. It seems to me that with the possible exception of Mary Gaitskill, no one has written as well about sex and identity in thirty or forty years. For example, he wanted to know when the husband was with us both at once, whose name did he cry out when he came? He asked for the tenderest time, the most violent time, the most nonchalant time, the classiest time, the first and the last time, all twelve times.” Besides being one of the most erotic stories in contemporary literature, “Offertory” is incredibly sad, and very revealing about all the hardship that transpires between men and women. I made up something I guessed would be what he wanted. The narrator, like the author herself, is an adept in the telling, and she provides a wealth of details: “And when I really could not remember what happened the tenth time, I made something up. He's the lover who would have her tell him stories of her carnal escapades. Marriages are relentlessly falling apart throughout The Dog of the Marriage, and pregnancies are ending badly, and pets vanish or are killed, and all of this dissolution is intolerable and overwhelming, until we get to the story called “Offertory.” Essentially a sequel to “Tumble Home,” in which the painter of the earlier novella (the recipient of that narrator's direct address epistle) is here embodied once more in a carnally voracious lover, now directly engaged with the delicate first-person speaker of Hempel's later efforts. And still so many ways to go wrong, as when I said to Chatty, hadn't she colored her hair, and Chatty's frosty reply that she had not colored her hair, she had enhanced it.”Īnd thus the bedroom. Which do you think I chose?” The unspeakable tragedy that is just offscreen in “Tumble Home,” a mother's suicide, is of such magnitude that the story is bent by its force, and yet the narrator's insistence on attempting levity in the face of this legacy makes her, and the story itself, that much more electrifying: “So a lot of the time it's moisturizers and accessories, physical fitness and hair. I saw that I could close the space in D-E-Y. In “Tumble Home,” the narrator addresses an absent lover directly, from institutional confines, her tired voice given mainly to the little amusements of her daily life, though much around her is about suffering and the attempt to recover from it: “The other day I was playing Scrabble with Karen. Which is to say that “Tumble Home,” the story, represented a new zenith in a career that already had many, many high points, and if the reading public had, as it does now and again, turned some of its attention away from the implicit challenge of short fiction, not to mention the novella, the loss was theirs. Only a scant few works of contemporary fiction have done the same with such grace and style. 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 narrative then goes on to undercut virtually every trustworthy assertion made in its prior pages, doing a merry dance of destruction on the grave of the realistic fiction, conjuring instead the many illuminating paradoxes of consciousness and identity. It's true that it took Hempel five years to write the 137 pages of the second volume of stories, and it's true that this was actually fast for her (Tumble Home took seven years, and The Dog of the Marriage took eight), but when the results are as pitch-perfect and unforgettable as “The Harvest,” or “The Most Girl Part of You,” or “Rapture of the Deep,” all of them stunners from the second volume, who really gives a shit how long the book takes or whether it's shorter than one of those big encyclopedic tomes that the boys, obsessed with the sound of their own voices, were frequently writing in the same period? When “The Harvest” first came out in Gordon Lish's Quarterly, I remember being arrested not only by the broad course of the story (of the narrator's massive car accident) itself, but most especially by the double-space break in the middle, after which the following appeared: “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.

I'd go so far as to say that Reasons to Live looks like a sweet but quaint memory in the brilliant light of Hempel's next book, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990). “Al Jolson” is a gem in a volume that while possessed of bounteous moments of transfiguration (I like, for example, the lovely conversation between a father and his children about Jell-O in “Celia Is Back,” or Wesley the world-weary comedian in “Three Popes Walk into a Bar”) is the beginning of a great career rather than its finest hour.

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