The dog of the marriage : stories /

Hempel's new collection of stories arrives at love from every angle: in, near, outside, beyond, and approaching. The love in her world is described in textures and small but important details. These are memorable objects, like the potted amaryllis in the backseat of the narrator's car in Jesus Is Waiting, or the range of food brought to the widower by well-meaning women in The Afterlife, or the strange bottles of liquor found in the kitchen of the lover in Offeratory. These objects, imbued with such sudden meaning, resonate against the muted tone of Hempel's prose. The title story, for example, is actually a series of marriage snapshots, each pressing the family dog into a new role, central on the surface but, on further consideration, representative of other, more truly central issues in modern Western marriages. It is without question the highlight of the collection, though other bright spots emerge as well--in particular, The Uninvited, a haunting and tense account of a 50-year-old woman who is waiting to take a pregnancy test after being raped. Hempel handles the treatment of pain and love with a combination of confusion, resignation, and healthy respect. If this were music, it would be played in a modal tuning, dark and timeless. --Debi Lewis Copyright 2005 Booklist

"[W]as there anybody who wasn't here to get over something too?" wonders the narrator in the sublime "Offertory." Not in this book, Hempel's fourth collection (after 1997's Tumble Home), as unnamed narrators struggle with breakups, disillusionment, loss. Two marriages come to grief in the title story: the narrator's husband falls in love with someone else, while her gift of a dog has tragic consequences for another couple. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman mourning the loss of her lover's affection drives obsessively, becoming a connoisseur of truck stops and budget motels, "moved to tears when the lane I am in merges with another." The 50-year-old narrator of "The Uninvited" muses on the eponymous movie as she delays taking a pregnancy test; the potential father is either her estranged husband or her rapist. Dogs appear often, as creatures more giving and wise than the men and women who own them. All the remarkable, original obliqueness of Hempel's previous work is here, but with slightly less of its heart, and an earlier lightheartedness has been exchanged for a kind of gorgeous severity, as if each story began at four times its length and was stripped away until only what was essential remained. Though it's not the most accessible of collections, it's deeply affecting, as Hempel paints a fictional world that is sharp and lonely but also marked by beauty and unexpected generosity. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (Mar. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

You can read the notes to these stories, all appearing on one page, as if they were a story. Hempel's (Reasons To Live) seven spare and enigmatic sentences identify quotations and allusions. Together, the references to Patricia Highsmith, a thanatologist, an obscure filmmaker, and Swinburne suggest something strange, if not menacing. In fact, the stories resemble the notes. "Memoirs" has only one sentence. The first-person female narrators are distraught. The title story, the longest and most coherent, involves a woman whose husband left her and another woman whose husband was killed by a car when he chased their dog, which had been trained by the first woman. In the last story, a woman maintains her lover's interest by describing her earlier sexual experiences in a threesome. "The Uninvited" creates a parallel between the mystery film of the same title and the narrator's possible pregnancy. Suitable for contemporary fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/04.]-Elaine Bender, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Another slim volume from Hempel (Tumble Home, 1997, etc.), the theme this time being skewed and skewered relationships (and, yes, there are dogs in many of the stories). Most of the nine pieces involve a narrator coping with the end of a relationship. In "Jesus Is Waiting," Hempel captures the frenzy of a breakup through a narrator who embarks upon the "geographic cure": long bouts of driving along the highways while listening to the Al Green tape that the man who won't speak to her made while he still did. In "The Uninvited," the narrator is preparing to take a pregnancy test ("I was fifty years old and ten days late. If menopausal, go on estrogen; if pregnant, go on welfare"), the potential father being either her estranged husband or a fellow student who came by to pass along class notes and ended up raping her. The title story begins on the last night of a marriage, at the ballet, and follows the narrator through the comforts she gains by training dogs for the blind. In "Beach Time," the narrator lives next door to careless summer renters who toss their empty Coronas (limes still inside) over the privet hedge and are heedless of the fact that sound carries over water. Their marriage falls apart within her earshot, while she worries because they're not watering her neighbor's orchids. Of questionable value are "Memoir," a single-sentence short-short that doesn't carry the wit or weight of a run-of-the-mill one-liner, and "Reference #388475848-5," a rant to the New York City Parking Violations Bureau. But then there's "Offertory," a longer piece about a young woman who tells her lover erotic stories from a past affair with a married man and woman, a meditation on storytelling and sex that is stunning in its overall effect. Sketchy, in all, with moments of the breathtaking language that characterizes Hempel's best work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.