Fragments of Amy Hempel

If you’ve had your fill of prolegomenon and genealogies, of discursive and logical exegesis - if you no longer gain from elaborate figurative emblems of an argument’s structure, loops and transcendental deductions and language game absurdities, I do not blame you. I too have supped at that rich vein and been be bedeviled and bedazzled by its seeming suppleness, even as I grew pale and sickly, redolent of bologna, wearing scuffed and unpolished leather boots even in the summer, and incapable of making direct eye contact, even in my dreams. I am an enthusiast, but to fatigue I have succumbed. I am philosophical about my benumbed philosophical capacity. Still I encourage you . Have at it, I say. A more virulent strain is not a more deadly strain if the strategy is to contain rather than to treat, I say. Much of what I say is just saying what someone else once wrote down.

And as against that burned-out husk, that brittle desiccated commonplace book, I commend to you the rich tradition of the American short story, circa 1988-2010, including Barthelme’s ambling progeny and the whelped pups of Annie Proulx’s hard won Western grace. And I do so commend with a kind of stalking-horse idea at hand - that the short story that is not particularly invested in being “about” something, that sustains itself at the level of the sustenance and neither kvetches nor pines for leaving its readers’ nails bitten or heart a-palpitating, is but a taxonomic attenuation of the philosophic proposition-making mood, not a different species altogether. See for example Tumble Home, to which I have flipped at random in this collection of Hempel’s stories.

I am that overexposed light, that awkward angle, that angle of repose between the moldy but redoubtable Stegner oeuvre and the coiled kink of wayward but deep exploration that the certain class of Stegner fellows have kicked out over the decade and a half that marked three straight Republicans administrations and the onset of a Slick Willy era that is simultaneously more callow and more polished than what immediately preceded it.