December 11–18, 1997

book quarterly

Amy Hempel Gordon Lish.

While Hempel's slim volume is lyrical and meditational, the Lish collection is raw, gaudy and, at times, gut-bustingly funny.

Deee-Lish

The mentor's still got it. His protégé has matured.

by Julia MacDonnell

Tumble Home

By Amy Hempel, Scribner, 155 p., $21

Self-Imitation of Myself

By Gordon Lish, Four Walls Eight Windows, 335 p., $22

More than a decade ago, in the pages of Vanity Fair, novice storyteller Amy Hempel adoringly profiled Gordon Lish, the fabled teacher of her fiction workshop at Columbia. Titled "Captain Fiction," Hempel's article gushed about Lish's passion and perspicacity, his commitment to and engagement with his students. Not long afterward, as an editor at Alfred A Knopf, Lish saw Hempel's first collection, Reasons to Live, into print. The book was dedicated to him.

Back then, in the '80s, Lish seemed to occupy the central command post of literary publishing in the United States. Through his work as fiction editor at Esquire, at Knopf, and finally at The Quarterly, the magazine he founded, and with his indefatigable teaching (which he claims to enjoy more than writing), Lish became a kind of uber-editor. He not only decided who got published and who didn't, but also waged an all-out war on traditional literary values, advocating for a radical "new fiction" that renounced plot and character development in favor of collage-like structures, isolated and obsessional narrative voices. Language, in Lish's world and word, was deity.

Amy Hempel was just one among his chosen coterie, a small phalanx of Lish acolytes, Lishites, who were loosed upon the literary landscape at the height of Lish's power. (Among the others were Mary Robison, Barry Hannah, Bette Pesetsky, Michael Martone and Janet Kauffman.) While they were being published in the most prestigious literary magazines, and their books translated for a voracious foreign market, the critic Sven Birkerts accused them, in the New Republic, of lacking moral seriousness, of abrogating "literary responsibility" altogether.

Alas! Time and an ever more market-driven publishing milieu have rendered Birkerts' critique not less valid but less urgent. For, despite the resounding buzz these post-Raymond Carver minimalists generated, they didn't sell well in America. And these days, with Lish no longer acquiring fiction for a major house, a writer's potential for selling books to the movies is what determines both buzz and book contracts.

Now, ever so quietly, come new books by both Hempel and her master teacher Lish. Tumble Home, seven stories and the titular novella, is Hempel's third collection, her first in seven years. Self-Imitation of Myself is Lish's fourth collection—and the sixth Lish book published since 1996 by the small independent publisher Four Walls Eight Windows.

Considered together, Tumble Home and Self-Imitation represent nothing less than the yin and yang of contemporary postmodernism. While Hempel's slim volume is lyrical and meditational, offering a subtle expansion of her fictional territory and confirmation of her gift as an exquisite prose stylist, the Lish collection is raw, gaudy, effusive and, at times, gut-bustingly funny.

Hempel's sly wit, astonishing eye for detail and passion for animals, especially dogs, are amply displayed in Tumble Home. But what one notices most is the maturation of Hempel's voice and her fictional concerns. Her early fictions were distinguished by quirky humor and a detached yet anguished voice. Celebrated as a miniaturist, Hempel excised background and transitions, leaving narratives just a page or two in length, compelling fragments well suited to her stories of scarred lives, loss and disconnection. Yet Hempel's absurdist stance sometimes deprived her work of emotional power, and her dazzling cleverness often substituted for depth.

In Tumble Home, instead of anxious girls and women, mostly single, we have couples and families—parents interacting with children, husbands with wives, one male protagonist, and a sense of connection, however tenuous it might be. The titles may be less memorable, but the stories themselves, brightly lit and compressed as lyric poems, are richer and more resonant. "Weekend," in a few deft paragraphs, offers a glimpse into the sensual, light-hearted world of families on vacation. After the children are in bed, the men join the women for a cigarette on the porch, "absently picking tics engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women goodnight, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay."

In "Sportsman," Hempel glides into Ann Beattie territory with the story of Jack, who drives non-stop from California to New York after his wife leaves him. He stays with his friends, Vicki, a physical therapist obsessed with feelings and working things out, and her husband, the doctor. Hoping to help Jack figure out what to do with the rest of his life, Vicki fixes him up with a psychic. But the psychic turns out to be "only as spooky as any beautiful girl" and might actually be that future. Preparing for his second meeting—date?—with her, Jack "was ready for whatever the psychic could tell him. He wanted to be told what was coming and where he had been. And if you had to, he reasoned, there was nothing wrong with faking your way to where you belonged."

But the novella Tumble Home—at 83 pages, Hempel's most sustained and fully realized effort—is what makes this collection most worthy of attention. Like Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, it is an extended letter written by a demented character to a well-known person. But the similarity ends there. For the writer of Lish's letter is a noisy serial killer demanding something of Capote, while Hempel's is a fragile woman, recovering from a nervous breakdown, who longs only for a relationship.

One may think of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, or of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Tumble Home, however, is anything but another dreary screed on female madness. It is, rather, the engaging story of a woman's search for herself. For, as she writes, in a series of beautifully rendered vignettes, to the famous painter with whom she's once had tea, we understand that she's not just imagining her dream lover, but also inventing the dream of herself. "I am so suggestible," she warns him. "I would try to become the woman you wanted without even knowing I was trying. As it is, I am barely the woman I am."

Living in a mental hospital where the so-called guests hang their "libidos on hooks outside the door," she begins to discover or recover her memory, especially about the suicide of her mother.

"The only surprise when she killed herself was that she had killed herself. I said to my father, 'I always thought if she killed anyone, the one she killed would be me.' And my father said, 'I know.'"

The tumble home, she explains, is a shipbuilding term, the widest part of a ship's bow before it narrows to cut through water, the point where water parts and goes to one side of the ship or the other. "To me," she says, "the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you."

Yet her letter hints that what she yearns for more than anything is to be touched, connected. Which makes Tumble Home the poignant story of a woman going not mad but sane.

In his workshops, Lish has said he urges students to write dangerously, to reach for extremes, to avoid at all costs "the centrist stance." It is advice that Hempel appears to have heeded well.

Self-Imitation of Myself indicates that Lish can take his own advice. While the narrator of most of these bizarre fictions is a writer named Gordon Lish, there is no language too high or too low to be captured in his net; no situation too private or too tawdry to be ransacked for material.

Pick at random and enjoy. In "Wouldn't a Title Just Make It Worse?" the fictional Lish, "the most fastidious little thing in all the wide and untidy world," is about to leave for the airport, after staying as a guest at the home of a professor, when he defecates and discovers to his horror that a "solitary, big-shouldered, brute-sized stool" keeps re-appearing in the bowl. He flushes and flushes, but "…just as I had guessed…it, this thing, this twist of Lishness, lifts itself back into blatant view—grinning I do believe—even, it seemed to me, winking…" While imagining possible methods of disposal and their consequences, Lish also considers the nature of storytelling.

Known for transforming worn figures of speech, clichés, colloquialisms and jingles into a fresh idiom, Lish continues that work here. "Sophocles," for example, is a mad satire of gourmet recipe instructions: "Cut shortening into safflower oil. Remove cabbage from double boiler. Steam and then spread until surface is crumbly. Beat with whisk. Set aside."

"Philosophical Statements" begins as a hilarious send-up of 12-Step program affirmations—"Be wary, here comes negativity... be not the mount for negativity's assault…"—before veering off into a mad life of its own.

If you read these stories in order, the barest outline of a cohesive narrative begins to emerge: the story of a mid- to late-career writer out to prove he's more than just "Lish, the lit-fag, hyphen entered aforethought," or a writer still grasping for originality. He's a 60-something man enduring his wife's long illness and death, a lover, a teacher, a grandfather, an entertainer, accruing losses and humiliations—and investigating the nature of story and its meanings—as he makes his way through his life. What a trip!

If Hempel is inching toward an elliptical realism, Lish here displays the protean playfulness of such metafictionists as Barth and Barthelme. With heavily revised paperback editions of his early work—among them Dear Mr. Capote, What I Know So Far and Peru—now available from Four Walls Eight Windows, and a new novel and more reissues scheduled for next year, readers have a great geyser of Lish literature from which to choose.

Years ago, speaking of teaching, Lish likened himself to a boxing coach. He said, "I can tell you how to take the guy, though I can't do it myself." Which seems to restate the aphorism, "Those who can't, teach."

With Self-Imitation of Myself, Lish gives the lie to his own proclamation, proving that he is, indeed, one teacher who can. Writing with the verve and energy of a tyro, Lish scores a knock-out in the first round. The old man can do it—he can take the guy all by himself.