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Amy Hempel’s
The Dog of the Marriage The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel. I finished Amy Hempel’s latest short story collection, “The Dog of the Marriage,”after a visit to the Georgia O’Keefe museum in “Nobody sees a flower,
really, it is so small. It takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time,
like having a friend takes time”.—O’Keefe Like O’Keefe, Hempel is a microscopic visionary highlighting what
others don’t take the time to see. Not content to paint pretty reality to
scale, they both expose the insides, everything that would remain hidden at
first glance, pistil, stamen, fleshy petals, longing, instability, desperation,
vulnerability, stasis, recovery. Hempel’s work is often defined in vogue terminology:
minimalist, fragmentary, wit, passion, reserve. Her characters are described
as people in crisis or people post crisis. And while all of the above is true,
this does little to illustrate the effect of the above elements together, how
she surgically implements equal parts passion and restraint, wit and self
reflection, in a way that pulls from the text an emotional resonance evident
in the narrator and in the reader. Hempel’s narrative voice in “The Dog of the Marriage” is at
once detached and achingly intimate. In the title story, Hempel
writes a narrator experiencing the loss of a relationship and marriage. The
narrator’s husband is in love with someone else and here she is caught in a
moment of reflection. “Did I invite this? Is
it like sitting in prayers at school when the headmistress says, “Who dropped
the lunch bags on the hockey field?” and although you went home for lunch,
you think, I did, I did.” Hempel turns her microscopic lens on humanity with
stripped to the bone sentences that lend power to her work. In a story reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas,” Hempel’s
“Reference # 388475848-5” is the narrators written response to a parking citation
for “covering ‘The Empire State’ ” on her license plate. The narrative tale
twists through events leading to the ticket. Hempel’s
wit and economy are in full force. The
narrator’s response to the ticket is a plea for justice. “You accuse me of trying
to put a human face on this. And you would be correct. But is there anything wrong with that?
Unless the ticket was issued by the guy my dog startled, I know it isn’t
personal. But I’m not a person who can
take this ticket in stride with the kind of urbanity urbane people prize in
each other.” What is classic Hempel in this story is that the narrative moves through
witty barbs to a scene in the park where the narrator has a frightening
experience. The two experiences of the ticket and the park are then linked in
the narrative and though she returns to wit, the incident in the park haunts
the remaining narrative like a ghost. In her final story,
“Offertory,” a narrator is coaxed by her lover to divulge details of a past
romantic encounter with a couple, the result is a
sexual Scheherazade. “In bed where I describe
the coupling years ago, he would suddenly roll me over so that I was on
top. He would tell me to lean over and
show him how my hair had made a tent over the face of the husband or the wife.”
Throughout “Offertory,”
in addition to the narrator’s storytelling, there are moments of delicate and
telling reflection. “It is possible to
imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.” Dogs that appear
throughout the narrative are harbingers of what’s missing for the narrators:
stability, loyalty and love. They are created as characters, not simply
symbols of what’s missing. The narrators also experience what they lack in
their human connections in their relationships to canine companions. Works by both Hempel and O’Keefe invite us to pause, take an extra
beat, then two, then three as we witness the everyday, a flower or a failed
marriage, from the inside out. They entreat us to do more than stop and smell
the roses. We are to enjoy every subtle color change, each dip and fold, the
way they look when they fade and fall. Amy Hempel
paints a rich tapestry of passion, longing, and obsession, lost and found
with a style as telling as a fingerprint and with stories filled with
characters up to their necks in life. -Donna Epler |