The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories
By Valerie Martin
Vintage, 212 pages, $13 paper
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
By Amy Hempel
Scribner, 409 pages, $27.59
An enrapturing and ruthless storyteller, Valerie Martin possesses a predator’s ability to mesmerize her prey. Whether she’s writing fiction about divorce, the thin divide between humankind and the rest of life, or slavery in “Property,” her most recent historical novel, Martin evinces a sensibility that veers between the clinical and the Gothic.
In her new collection, “The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories,” Martin writes with scathing authority about the lives of artists. In six masterfully crafted and stealthily spooky tales, she considers the elusiveness of artistic inspiration, jealous rivalry among artists, the suffering of those who love artists (the work always comes first) and the impression that artists sell their souls to succeed.
Two male painters compete for recognition in New York City, while the woman they love is drained of all vitality by her selfless roles as muse and breadwinner. A starving artist in New Orleans (Martin’s hometown) who can sell only the most insipid of his creations, fails to stamp out his debilitating infatuation with a female artist who prefers other women. A promising theater major survives a potentially disastrous affair with a married professor and mother of two only to endure a tragedy so wrenching he abandons his actor dreams. Edith, a poet and tenured professor at a Connecticut college, is invited to a conference in Rome, where she and her lover, Isabel, a dance teacher, argue over everything from decolletage to whether art requires stability or adventure, studiously avoiding the true source of their anxieties.
Every story is compelling and satisfying, but two pack an extra punch. “The Change,” ostensibly about an artist going through menopause, slowly morphs into a subtly supernatural tale with an Edgar Allan Poe twist that links the unconscious aspect of artmaking to mysterious, archaic powers. The title story, “The Unfinished Novel,” portrays two wannabe writers who meet in college in New Orleans. Maxwell goes on to graduate school in Vermont. Vampish and sly Rita soon follows and proves to be an exceptionally gifted and original writer. She and Maxwell subsume their rivalry in a love affair that ends badly, even outrageously. Twenty years later, Maxwell, a successful novelist, is shocked to discover that Rita has been cruelly transformed by a punishing and peripatetic life, during which she has lugged around the immense manuscript for her still-unfinished novel. Will it become his albatross? Is art a curse?
These finely calibrated and bracing stories provide a welcome antidote to the sentimentality and half-baked spirituality that are often draped over art like bunting on a bomb. Martin’s tales of betrayal, obsession, connivance and failure put the firepower back into art.
For Amy Hempel, the short story is all about precision. Born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and California before becoming a New Yorker, Hempel is the author of four potent short-story collections, work treasured by ardent lovers of the perfect sentence. These cherished stories, dating back to 1985, are now gathered in one volume, a book that rewards many revisits and breath-held immersions.
Hempel has an epigrammatic style and bead on pain not unlike Joan Didion’s, while her dry humor is of the Lorrie Moore kind, and her off-kilter charm and covert poignancy summon Julie Hecht to mind. But these comparisons are offered strictly for aesthetic orientation, because Hempel is unique. Her word-by-word virtuosity is off the charts; her artistic evolution is phenomenal.
Hempel’s edgy stories are stoked by her study of journalism and forensics, her interest in improvisational comedy, her fascination with the way people talk and her love of dogs. Her canine characters enhance the emotional palette of her stories of trauma and dislocation, messy relationships and the quest for consolation. Fine-grained, interior and quicksilver, Hempel’s stories take the form of witty rants, recitations and reports, bravura performances mostly by women struggling to regain composure and a sense of purpose after a grievous loss or assault. Deadpan funny, tough-gal confidential, Hempel’s narrators slap down the particulars of their derailed lives like cards in an endless game of solitaire.
Many of Hempel’s early tales, studies in provisional lives, are set in earthquake country, and beaches, places of contrast and change, figure prominently. Her spiky characters are stuck in limbo, their homes damaged or lost, marriages ending, friends dying. They try to stave off chaos and sorrow by establishing austere and solitary daily routines, or by hitting the highway. Telling their hard-luck stories with insouciance helps. As for Hempel, she revels in the phosphorescence of words as they float and shape-shift in the oceanic dark of the psyche.
The stories in the first half of the collection bristle with barbed humor and swerve abruptly to accommodate surprising developments. Hempel has perfect timing, a taste for the ludicrous and an astonishing ear for dialogue. In “Du Jour,” for example, a hilarious tale in part about the misery of quitting smoking, a woman gains weight not because she’s overeating instead of smoking cigarettes but because she has stopped coughing: “Coughing was exercise for me.” As characters ricochet off each other and work at cross-purposes, as dreams well up and memories intrude, there is no sense of authorial distance, no reminder that these are carefully designed and constructed works of art. Instead, we are fully absorbed into the inner worlds of Hempel’s uncanny narrators. Urgent and seamless, these stories feel injected rather than read.
Injuries psychic and physical, profound empathy for animals, illness, injustices great and small–Hempel approaches it all with an unfailing gift for exactitude. Over time, her stories have gained dimension and resonance as she has shifted from arch comedy to profoundly moving psychological explorations.
“Tumble Home” is the turning point. A woman in a mental-health facility is writing letters to a famous painter about her circumscribed days, circling tensely around the tragedy of her artist mother’s suicide. In Hempel’s most recent work, the audacious and astringent stories originally collected in “The Dog of the Marriage,” she writes perilously close to the bone, dissecting the repercussions of rape, the exhilaration and exhaustion of erotic love, the end of trust. Measuring and weighing every feeling and every word, Hempel delves into the mysteries of human consciousness, the intricate mesh of life and death, and the symbiotic pairing of irony and beauty. One image can serve as a key to her vision:
“The tide this time of year washes hundreds of tiny starfish up onto the beach. It leaves them stranded in salty constellations, a sandy galaxy in reach.”
A veritable cosmos of revelations is in reach in “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.”
