Characters too often in search of a story

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Scribner, 409 pp., $27.50

In the unlikely event the literary community should ever decide to erect a Short Story Hall of Fame, there should be no argument that Amy Hempel's ``In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" belongs in the inaugural class.

``Al Jolson" is a devastating work of fiction. Hempel's story of two friends, one terminal and hospital-bound, the other come to comfort her, is a model of economy. In fewer than 5,000 words, Hempel manages to develop a friendship and a situation that is as complex and real as anything that fiction can hope to produce. The characters don't even have names. There's just the woman in the hospital bed and the woman at the side of the hospital bed. Life and death are all that matters. Names are redundant.

At her dying friend's request, the woman who will live tells stories about ``useless stuff," in an effort to distract and amuse.

`` `Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. . . . But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons.'

`` `Oh, that's good,' she said. `A parable.'

`` `There's more about the chimp,' I said. `But it will break your heart.'

`` `No, thanks,' she says, and scratches at her mask. "

But, of course, there's no avoiding where this is going. The dying friend puts it best:

`` `You know,' she said, `I feel like hell. I'm about to stop having fun.' "

What follows is a betrayal of staggering proportions. The woman who will live is overcome by sorrow and compassion for her friend, but also by an utterly recognizable fear of death, of exposure to death, of catching death. So the healthy woman leaves, and her friend is left to die alone, and the living must continue to go on living.

In light of the greatness of ``Al Jolson," then, it is perhaps inevitable that `` The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel " -- composed of her four collections -- will come as something of a disappointment to readers familiar only with her masterpiece. It rises only occasionally to the heights of that early story, from Hempel's first book, `` Reasons to Live " (1985) . Perhaps most frustrating about this is the clear evidence throughout that Hempel's phrasing, her insights into the contradictions that make interesting characters, and above all her fine wit have continued to develop. As Rick Moody writes in the introduction, ``It's all about the sentences." And that's the problem. While Hempel is an extraordinary stylist, she often shows a depressing disinterest in narrative.

Consider ``Three Popes Walk Into a Bar," also from `` Reasons to Live, " told from the point of view of a manager of a regional comedian, the type who does cheesy television advertisements and medium-size venues. The comedian is burdened with a dubious wife, a former topless dancer who wants him to quit performing and buy a boat. The comedian has decided to acquiesce. We follow the characters through the lead-up to what seems to be the comedian's final performance -- and that's pretty much it. No one argues, no one is disagreeable, nothing unexpected happens. We don't even get to see the comedian do his act. More than that, the decision is never in doubt.

The next two collections in the volume , `` At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom " and ``Tumble Home, " are shot through with similar flat notes, characters in search of stories. In ``The Lady Will Have the Slug Louie," from ``Animal Kingdom," Hempel's nameless narrator considers, in succession, her dog's taste for beeswax candles, her brother's habit of feeding his boa constrictor mice dipped in vitamin powder, how as a child she spiced her brother's eggs with dirt, and a fairy-tale refrain about witches eating children.

This is an interesting train of thought, but more of an exercise than a fully formed fiction. Without the guiding wire of a setting, or an event, or a time, or any kind of narrative marker at all, the point of view floats in space, and finally drifts off.

No story suffers more from this lack of underpinning than the title novella of ``Tumble Home." Told in the form of a very long, somewhat flirtatious letter, sent from a woman in a remarkably casual-seeming mental institution, ``Tumble Home" is checkered with brilliant asides and sharp dialogue. It is also stultifying. There is no sense that any of the inhabitants of the institution is particularly eager to leave. There's no sense, in fact, that they want much of anything. A sense of time, let alone a sense of urgency, is non existent.

Fans of Hempel would probably argue that I've missed the subtlety in much of her fiction, and they may be right. What one reader sees as chiseled and pared down to raw emotion, another reader -- this one, say -- sees as the literary equivalent of a person who has recently undergone gastric bypass surgery. The fat is gone, but the body is draped with unseemly bags of skin. Where does the skin give way to bone? Too often, I just can't tell.

Still, the patience of those who find their way to her latest collection, `` The Dog of the Marriage, " will be rewarded. Here, Hempel has come almost all the way back to the balance of character and story that made ``Al Jolson" so affecting. In ``Beach Town" a voyeur observes the disintegration of his neighbors' marriage with unnerving detachment. In ``Reference #388475848-5" a letter of complaint digresses into a protest against everything from pushy car dealers to rude moviegoers. Best of all is ``Offertory," in which the letter-writer of ``Tumble Home" has fallen into a kinky affair with the older painter who was the object of her affection in the earlier story. While the approach is reminiscent of ``Al Jolson," the concerns are stranger and sexier, raising expectations for whatever Hempel has in store for us next. These may be the collected stories, but here's betting the best is yet to come.

Owen King is the author of ``We're All in This Together."