Sing to It, by Amy Hempel

Sing to It: New Stories by Amy Hempel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ranging in length from less than a page to over sixty, this new collection of short stories offers slices of experience in oblique, startling prose. One of the most moving—and difficult to read--stories, “A Full-Service Shelter,” is narrated by a volunteer for an animal shelter, in a repetitive cadence that evokes the messy, repeated attempts to save abandoned dogs—or at least to cherish them in their last hours: “they knew us as the ones who…came to take the death-row dogs…for a long last walk, brought them good dinners, cleaned out their kennels, and made their beds with beach towels and bath mats” (11). The longest story, “Cloudland,” tells a story of a long-ago baby given up for adoption at a maternity home that was not what it seemed. The mother, now a care-giver for the elderly, lives in a crumbling rental house in Florida, whose unswept porch, leaky roof, and overgrown vegetation teach us the depth of the narrator’s grief. Mundane events, such as buying Girl Scout cookies, are given a knife-twist: “New this year is a gluten-free option: the flavor is toffee. This is the kind I buy two boxes of, and the girl I hand the money to is the girl I gave away” (114). In almost Symbolist fashion, a painting of faceless girls in white dresses fleeing a storm, titled “Cloudland” (a gift to the narrator), points beyond itself to a psychic disaster that cannot be fully captured by words. Yet, amidst this mystery of loss, Hempel weaves dry humor that made me chuckle--like the elderly neighbor with a preference for Norwegian jokes: “Why Norwegian? Because he subscribed to a sort of Norwegian joke compilation. Maybe he was Norwegian. I kept my eyes on the ants in my car till the joke had crawled to its end” (131). In another story, a bowl of never-eaten green apples, like the poison apple in a fairytale, becomes an emblem of revenge. Polysemic and dissonant, Hempel’s stories jolt new meaning from the ordinary, and reground the extraordinary.



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