Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

After the dog's cremation, I lie in my husband's bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of "liquor" and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television in what my husband, Flea, said.

With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

My favorite story, I think, in Amy Hempel's collection Reasons to Live is "Nashville Gone to Ashes," about a woman whose veterinarian husband has died and left her with all the animals. The narrator, who came to the work of a vet reluctantly, is left with the parts of her life with Flea (his name is really F. Lee) that she hadn't chosen, and none of what she did. "I think it was that love that I loved," she writes of Flea's attention to his charges. "That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extent to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. My love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back?" I was touched by this story, and the simple grief of what gets left behind. At the end, the narrator finds herself giving money to a homeless man begging for help for his dog, and turning around and seeing a man without a dog, begging for himself. Do we value animals too much? Or do we value them because they serve, unable to talk--except for Flea's mynah--as repositories of our own loves and passions?

Many of the stories in Reasons to Live focus on grief and dying. There's a lot of hospitals. There's one, for instance, in "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that comes up a lot when people talk about stories they love. The narrator, sitting at chemotherapy with an old friend, plies her with fun facts that are almost always wrong. (For instance--Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out.) These facts come to stand in for something else, or nothing else, or the impossibility of finding something to give ground to a relationship that has lasted so long. But for me I preferred "Going," a slim little three-pager from the perspective of a reckless young daredevil who has miraculously survived a car accident while driving with his binoculars. The longer stories here feel no more "complete" or round than the flash stories; I often felt that Hempel offers only snapshots into stories--vivid and in bright detail, but only snapshots nonetheless. I thought this worked well in a pair of stories about fathers trying to keep their precocious children from experiencing a vague kind of familial unease that grips them: "Back to Celia" and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." Other stories felt difficult to penetrate, too wispy or impossible to grasp.