Books & Poetry

For those who prefer their fiction astringent, this book of short stories is the equivalent of a vat of whiskey sours. I sucked it back (all 400 pages) in a couple of long sessions and emerged high on Hempel’s cask-strength prose. How can you fail to love a writer whose narrator, motoring away from bad love, tells you: ‘I get a good feeling when I see traffic cones. They weigh next to nothing and cannot hurt a car. That’s not why I mow them down.’

In 20 years, Hempel has written a mere four books’ worth of short stories; still, she is only 56, so issuing a complete collection is odd. The finality of it suits her outlook, though: in Hempel’s world, marriages end, mothers commit suicide, daughters wind up in the doldrums or the madhouse. Only dogs provide solid consolation – but then, as the fragile letter writer in ‘Tumble Home’ points out with frigid logic, ‘my mother never slept with her head on my stomach, or licked my face awake’. No, indeed: and no dog ever killed herself with her daughter’s sleeping pills, leaving only a tersely practical note and a lifetime of bad memories.

Hempel is no cheerleader, but so what? Writing this beautiful is intrinsically cheering. ‘Men,’ says Jean in ‘Murder’. ‘They hate you at first. But all you have to do is be funny and sad and tall and thin and short and fat and wear them down, wear them down.’ The joy of this book is in lines like that – and every line is like that. The other great pleasure is in watching Hempel develop, from her first collection, ‘Reasons To Live’,
to the stories (first published in book form in 2005) that give this collection its arresting name. Her characterisation grows rounder, her stories lengthen and their sense of purpose grows. Narrators return from previous stories like revenants (Hempel likes ghosts and cemeteries, although the undead are clearly not what frightens her). Eventually, she deals with sex – problematic sex, naturally, but it’s still a shock when her narrators gets naked, whether they do so of their own volition or not (and the notion of volition is a lot more problematic, for Hempel, than even terrible sex). Who knows where her writing will go next? As long as it squashes a few more traffic cones, her readers will have nothing – everything – to be miserable about.