ENG 263: The Love Story

In Tony Earley’s story, “Charlotte,” the description of the bar on page 37 is done in such a easily relatable way. The details are generic to a bar of it’s kind, but it works because most everyone knows and/or has been to a bar exactly like this – PJ’s is familiar to the reader. The waitresses are familiar as well, but Earley also uses them to effectively describe different surrounding areas and Charlotte universities. We better understand the bar and the city through these women, just as we better understand the bar and the city through wrestling: “…. everyone in Charlotte is from somewhere else. Everyone in Charlotte tries to be something they are not.”

It isn’t until page 42 that we get an idea of what time this takes place. Earley describes the women in the bar as follows: “The girls do aerobics like religion and have big, curly hair stiff with mousse.” It is such a quick moment, but the reader immediately recognizes that we are in the eighties.

I’m not sure if this is a love story about Charlotte, wrestling, Starla, or all three.

“Charlotte” by Tony Earley is a weirdly interesting story. There is a lot going on in the story but the author manages to keep it all straight and concise without losing the reader. There is the fact that all the wrestlers left Charlotte, the poetry, the narrator’s love for Starla, the wrestling match, the bar, the wrestling characters, and then all of those things are woven together to create a pretty complex story. But it is extremely well-done so it works.

The way the story is written contributes to the cleanness of it. The sentences are well-structured, well-thought out, clear and to the point. But there is also varied sentence length which keeps the story from being dry and reading like a “learn-to-read” book or an instruction manual. One paragraph is a single word, “gone,”(34) while other sentences are longer and more complex, “she will say that she loves me only at the end of a great struggle…”(36-37). All of the sentences are well-written and don’t bog the reader down with confusing, flowery language, but the varied sentence structure still makes it an enjoyable story to read.

The complexity of the story and the different aspects of the story build on one another so that works as well. One of the most insightful moments into Karla’s character is when she is watching the wrestling match and rooting for Bob Noxious while the narrator is almost enamored with Lord Poetry. When she shouts things like “Kill Lord Poetry” and encourages Bob Noxious to “go get” Darling Donnis because Lord Poetry is after her soul, the reader is given an extraordinary amount of insight into Karla’s character that the narrator probably couldn’t give because of his bias, and the reader is allowed to see the difference in character between the narrator and his girlfriend that, again, the narrator might be blind to. The difference between the two is especially evident in the wrestling scenes, as the narrator almost identifies with Lord Poetry, and this difference could not have been made clear without the complexity of the story that the wrestling story provides.

“Charlotte” is definitely not what I was expecting.  When I first started reading the story I was dreading it.  The moment I saw wrestlers I was put off but almost immediately I was drawn back in.  Earley’s style is very different from Hempel’s.  While I wouldn’t say that his writing is straightforward, it was easier to digest, but that does not take away from how powerful his words are.  Earley takes the wrestler and somehow turns him into not only a symbol for the city of Charlotte, but for love.  It is interesting how the narrator seems so done with life.  He’s constantly talking about how Charlotte is the place to go to be something then end up as nothing.  He often mentions how the wrestlers left Charlotte and things just aren’t the same as they used to be.  It’s really easy to feel his sadness and nostalgia. But despite his normally negativity, he’s also still very hopeful, like he still doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying.  You see this with his relationship with Starla.  He is always trying to get Starla to admit that she loves him, yet she never does.  He’s stuck in the past obviously.

The best part of this is the last bit with him recalling the last time the wrestlers fought.  This is a story in short person so you’re always in the head of the narrator, but at this point you almost step out of his head and just kinda watch this scene from above, like you too are in the stands.  His description of the match is beautiful and how he ties it up with Darling Donnis choosing a wrestler is interesting and definitely something that we should discuss in class.  I guess it can be paralleled to the narrator’s relationship with Starla, but I think there’s a lot there that I’m not catching.

I think one of the most impressive bits of this piece is the tone; as a reader, you understand that the “I” character feels hostile towards her deceased husband, but after rereading it, I noticed he never actually did anything mean to her. It sounds like he loved her unconditionally, which we don’t know for sure until the end, and yet there’s a bitterness to all of her words. I think the way this was conveyed was partially by the mechanical way she described how she cared for all these animals that didn’t sound like hers. They weren’t family to her, they were burdens left over from her husband. She as a character is very detached from the events that are happening and have happened. This sets a tone of emotional stagnancy, borderline apathy with a few shining moments of longing (like how she falls asleep in his bed).

I believe the point of view was used to give a sense that we as readers couldn’t trust the main character. Right off the bat, when she says “My love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back?” we think that her husband doesn’t love her. As the story continues, however, we see his actions and real thoughts. I think this helps us as readers care about a character who isn’t perfect, who is deeply scarred with jealousy and greed, yet redeemable through her own misconceptions and her awareness of her flaws.

In both Amy Hempel’s “The Dog of the Marriage” and “Nashville Gone to Ashes” I think it is very clever that she chose dogs to interweave with her narrative about men, although I would argue to say that by mere page time men are the side characters in these stories. Similarly, she uses the chimp to talk about performance in the “In The Cemetery Where Al Johnson Is Buried.” In all three of these stories she never explicitly states she is using one to help talk about the other; she never creates a blatant simile.

Amy Hempel’s writing can be confusing at time and requires close reading. Through any possible confusion the aspect of the stories that stands out and guides the reader through the story is the narrator. This story is almost necessarily written in first person. The view of the narrator, the voice and the characteristics of the narrator are more easily seen in first person and are essential in this story for getting through it.

The character is laid out pretty early on for the reader. The first line of the story is “after the dog’s cremation I lay in my husband’s bed.” This is immediately telling for the reader. One, the character is focused on the cremation of an animal, and two, she’s lying in her “husband’s bed” instead of “their bed” or “her bed” which is odd because a lot of married couples share a bed. She is also watching the academy awards for dogs, not an average pastime either, so immediately thrown into this story, the reader has a vague idea about who this narrator is (or at least a few ways in which she differs from the average human being). We also learn valuable information about Flea, her husband, and that he is gone, but does not explain why it’s his bed instead of theirs or hers. It’s an intriguing first paragraph that sets up a lot for the story, including the strangeness of it all, some plot points, and the narrator as a person.

The way the story is written reflects thoughts and shows readers a deeper view into the narrator’s mind because we are basically reading what she is thinking. The way the story rambles and jumps, random sentences enter her mind, then it breaks and moves onto something else, is a fairly accurate representation of the mind at work. This is well-done throughout the story, and though it can make for a confusing read, the voice of the narrator is something the reader can cling to and remain grounded.

Random details throughout the story about the narrator are good at providing the reader with more of an idea on who she is. For example: “I thought a ham was an animal” and “he’s a real teenager of a dog… he’d have pimples” and “In the morning is when I pray” these little details about her that are dropped so casually into the story are very telling of her character, whether it be her sense of humor, her upbringing, her knowledge, her religious orientation, all of these things add together to make a realistic human being who is letting us into her thoughts, and they are necessary for us to care about her thoughts because she feels real to us.

When reading this short story I was largely reminded of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” a story in which boy meets girl but boy and girl are both terminally ill. But it seems in Hempel’s stories the reader is introduced to a new kind of love story. In her other stories, “Dog of the Marriage,” and “Nashville Gone to Ashes,” a greater love grows from the love that is given to the pets, a love that is lost. The tone of her story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” is one that is full of humor; even the ice cream they eat toward the end of the story is Good Humor. But it’s a kind of laughter that brought me closer to tears than happiness. Her sentence structure is so simple but so full of detail, so much so that it seems too easy to miss something crucial. I was particularly struck by the story about the man who was in a car wreck “on 101 going south,” (pg. 31). She mentions that the sight of his arm scared him to death, a sort of thought that made me pause. Dying of fear is such an incredibly horrible way to go. The way that Hempel goes about revealing, or hiding, the girl’s cancer is somewhat incredible in my mind. The reader is left to discover if she is actually plagued with cancer or some other terminal illness, but with the mentioning of her wig, she confirms a diagnosis. The secret of her illness seemed to add another dimension of sadness to the story — we’re not certain if she has cancer, but we’re also uncertain as to how old she is or how much longer she has to live. But the humor in the story continues with her burial next to famous entertainer Al Jolson. The endless distractions in the story, the random storytelling and the meaningless facts are essential to the meaning of the story. I would have shed tears if there hadn’t been an element to the story that helped me to forget the underlying sadness. In the final sentence she mentions the language of grief. I have learned that each individual processes and copes with grief differently, whether eat be through binge eating, exercising, or through humor.

Amy Hempel has a beautiful, yet sometimes confusing, style of writing.  Her story, “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is heart wrenching.  From the beginning with the line, “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” you instantly get this feeling of dread.  But, just like her other works like “Nashville Gone to Ashes” and “The Dog of the Marriage,” Hempel sort of veers the reader away into the head of the narrator.  The story goes from that gloomy first line, to listing off random facts that seem to have nothing to do with anything.  It really puts you in the head of the narrator and places you right in the center of the story.  What she feels, you feel.  This is also reinforced by writing the story in first person.  She clearly wants to get a certain tone across to the reader.

While this is a beautiful style of writing, like I mentioned before, it’s sometimes hella confusing.  One moment you are right with the narrator’s dying friend, and the next she’s talking about airplane flights and sitting on the beach.  This isn’t a criticism of her writing, in fact it’s beautiful.  The story is about the death of a friend and this erratic back and forth mirrors the emotions one feels in such a time.  Whether or not that is her intention, or she just writes like this all the time, I don’t know.  But it works and I love it.  I remember reading this story in intro to creative writing and I don’t think I really appreciated it until now.  How the story ends, with the story about the chimp, is incredible.  It is a beautiful way to describe the grief Hempel wants to get across without flat out saying, “I was sad.”  It’s a wonderful and depressing story.

Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” uses gallows humor to enforce the tragedy of the situation the narrator and her friend are in. Gallows humor is always about very unpleasant or serious circumstances, such as death, war, disease, or crime. In this story, the characters use it to deal with the reality inevitable death of the former college roommate. For example, the Good Doctor’s joke about epileptics is very dark, but the character is portrayed in a positive light. The roommate is clearly afraid of dying and wants the narrator to distract her from her fears. The narrator knows this and does not try to talk her out of her fears because she feels her friend has a right to be afraid.