Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live) delivers a wildly exploratory short story collection. The 15 pieces in Sing to It include a nice mix of flash fiction and longer entries. The titular first story sets an ever-mysterious tone: "At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else." Of course metaphors abound, bizarre spectacles, but also a sense of specificity that could rightly be called the opposite of cliché. The same story also hints at what unites it with the others: "When danger approaches, sing to it." Hempel carves out distinctive characters in the crook of exceptional circumstances. They are imperiled people, all facing something ominous in their lives, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. It's as if Hempel has a secret guide to her own creations, knowing the point of inflection for each.
In "A Full-Service Shelter," a volunteer at an animal shelter that euthanizes dangerous dogs explains how the animals see the humans: "They knew me as the one who loved in them what I recoiled from in people: the patent need, the clinging, the appetite." But the narrator seems to need the dogs just as much, as if caring for them makes the world more sensible. Some of the stories reach the realms of surrealism, such as the "The Doll Tornado," which includes a storm of dolls touching down in an old factory in Greensboro, N.C.
Other stories read more like parables, short illustrations drawing out some moral from an absurdly human predicament. In "The Correct Grip," for example, a woman gets a call from the wife of the man who attacked her. The wife wants to know if she should stay with the man, but the narrator says she's not in a position to offer advice. Later, reflecting upon the incident, she says, "I was dismayed by my impulse to make fun of rescue. But there is something so convenient about rescue." "The correct grip" refers to her literal grip on her dog leash, and how she comes to recognize the power to make a fist and defend herself.
If some of the flash fiction pieces feel slight, Hempel makes up for it in "Cloudland," the longest entry, at the end of the collection. It centers on a single woman living and working in north Florida. In between work days as a health aide to the elderly, she remembers a major life decision: when she went to a maternity home in Maine and gave up her baby for adoption. She imagines the child as an adult, seeing her everywhere, and is disturbed to learn the home had a dark past. As she wrestles with regret, the world around grows more dangerous. Hempel uses the setting to evoke pervasive doom: climate change, hurricanes, snakes, criminal neighbors. The sense of foreboding slowly grows. Like in her other stories, Hempel creates an all-too-human character looking to escape the past but stymied by an equally menacing future.
Sing to It fascinates. It pulses with absurdist glee, but has enough humanity to ground its characters in the hard work of looking forward. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset
Shelf Talker: Amy Hempel offers a smorgasbord of characters in this weirdly affecting short story collection.