Customer Reviews

Ms. Hempel Chronicles (Library Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I would never have read this book had it not fallen into my hands at the urging of a friend. First of all, what is with that awful, awful cover? And the title? Again, awful.

How many lessons must I (and publishers, for shame) learn about judging a book by its cover? As a writer, I cannot recommend this book enough. Ms Hempel is a thoroughly engaging protagonist full of doubt, wonder, humor, and above all heart. This is a book about life and its author a master. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's words are carefully chosen - so carefully chosen as to flow effortlessly for the reader.

The sentiment here is not heavy handed; she doesn't beat you over the head. The book is written matter-of-fact, devoid of the chick-flicky weepiness that I so despise. So why did I find myself weeping at the end of this wonderful work of art? I suppose it's because I, as with her former students, remain deeply haunted by Ms. Hempel.

I read "Yurt" in the New Yorker, was anxious for more, and The Ms Hempel Chronicles delivered. As a teacher of adolescents, I was struck at how Bynum nailed the emotional dynamic of the classroom, relationships between teachers and students, the internal struggles of the characters to become who they are and will be. Despite the very different setting and cast of characters from those I know in my own classroom, the relationships and realizations of Ms Hempel seemed uncannily familiar to me. Also - the descriptive style is hilarious as well as dead on. I'm planning on passing it along to my middle school colleagues.

Ms. Hempel the schoolteacher lives, works, and loves with both feet firmly planted in the realm of the mundane, but her gently persistent sense of wonderment about life leads to the discovery of the marvelous in the very crevices and folds of the day-to-day. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's masterful storytelling navigates these twists and turns of nine-to-five city life in a way that (sometimes in the space of a single page!) bears the heart of her reader from ho-hum to melancholy to raptures and back. We meet Ms. Hempel's family, friends, students, colleagues, and love interests, but the novel is really about the profound experience of normal days: finding the remarkable in the unremarkable, the sublime in the routine, a sudden burst of the soul against the tick-tock of the clock. As in life, the plot's movement yields to the force of the heroine's day-in and day-out, but also, quite unexpectedly, draws us into the subtle undercurrent of her intimate journey toward spiritual plenitude. Like her poetic given name, Beatrice, tucked away from everyday view, Ms. Hempel's soul-searching makes gentle cameo appearances at the surface of her daily grind. The novel's power lies in this perfect tension between schoolmarm and muse. Their counterpoint reverberates like a soft heartbeat lending a timeless and organic harmony to the din of our ordinary days.

As a reader, I often feel like a voyeur without the negative stigma brought about by reality television. Bynum's slim novella, which reads more like a collection of short stories, allows us to revel in this role, granting a nearly unobstructed view of Ms. Hemple. We are given a set of chapters, not necessarily in order, plucked from different times in the life of this "rebellious" child turned middle school teacher turned urban planner. Though each section could stand alone, the distinct voice of a developing Ms. Hemple pulls the pieces together in a naturally cohesive way. Without giving us all of the answers, Bynum allows us to discover Ms. Hemple as she is in the process of discovering and evolving herself; I did not have to stretch myself to identify with this character.

Though the subject matter may seem perfectly ordinary, the quality of the writing is anything but. Bynum has an outstanding command of the English language and I was simply blown away by some of her descriptions. I walked away from this book thinking, "this author is an extraordinary writer." However, I also walked away thinking that this book left me hanging, begging for another chapter to give it some sense of closure. It just did not feel complete and that prevented me from giving it five stars, which is too bad because I enjoyed this book a great deal. Enjoy every word of this one because there are not as many as you might wish and because writing of this caliber does not come along every day.

This book is one to savor. The language and details are utterly rich and absorbing. Highly recommended for lovers of literary fiction who love words, oddity and being transported.

Finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award losing to Netherlands. In my opinion, this book should have been the winner. Excellent writing, engaging story, great depth, and best of all, I found it laugh out loud hilarious. Loved this book and look forward to reading more work from Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. Not just for teachers and parents, but for all students, past and present.

Walbert, Kate. A Short History of Women. Scribner. 2009. 224p. $24.00.
Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lieh. Ms Hempel Chronicles. Harcourt. 2008. 195p. $23.00.

I have just finished two extraordinary novels about what it is to be a woman. The one is Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women and the other is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Ms Hempel Chronicles.

Both books are short: Walbert's is 224 pages and Bynum's is even shorter at 195 pages. Both expose their subject's lives episodically: Walbert, snapshots spanning five generations of extraordinary women in one exceptional family, episodes that stretch from 1898 to 2007; Bynum, interlocking and mutually reinforcing glances at the life and experiences of a middle-school teacher -seventh grade, social studies-- who doesn't think she's exceptional at all, from her first year teaching through a time years later when she has left teaching and encounters a former pupil and discovers what effect she had on that girl's life and the life of her classmates.

Both books are superb. No, that is the wrong word to use for them. "Superb," accurate though it is, is pallid, too critic-like. These books, and especially Short History, beg for the fan's language: I don't approve of these two books, I love them! Time and again, as I read Walbert's short novel, I thought: "What male (or female) author has ever caught the dilemmas and hang-ups of being male as well as she does with women, and in Walbert's case. Perhaps, from the outside, Raymond Carver's minimalist fiction does it, with stories of men who hurt but are unable to verbalize it; perhaps some of Updike does it --the short stories, not the Rabbit books; my dim memory of reading it years back suggests that Breeze D'J Pancake's one slim volume of posthumously published short stories came close to it, kind of a hyper-extended Hemingway world of inarticulate macho men wondering where it all points in the end. But in general, men, and men authors, don't expose themselves as unselfconsciously and generously as (many) women do -from Jane Austen to today's Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates, etc., etc.

Suffice it to say that both these books are exceptionally well written with passages that bring your heart up into your throat, they are so good. And the women they describe, for all their angst and unresolved issues, are strong and real.

Let me deal with them one at a time.

Walbert: moving back and forth across a hundred and nine years, Walbert traces the consequences of a mother's decision -a suffragist--in 1914 to starve herself to death while in prison. Her daughter and (clubfooted) son emigrate to the States. The daughter enrolls at Barnard College in New York City as a scholarship student and ends her life, a spinster, a distinguished chemist but in essential but undefined ways unsatisfied, as though, having striven all her life -what? To meet her mother's high but undefined standards?--to do more she still hasn't accomplished enough to banish the shadow of her mother (now gone seventy-one years) and isn't happy with what she has achieved. It is her niece, Dorothy -Dorothy Townsend (Barrett)-- who most approximates her suffragist grandmother, divorcing at the age of seventy-five her husband of forty-some yards and being arrested time after time for intrusions on a military air base where the bodies of dead soldiers from Iraq are transported. ("I am just trying to Do Something," Dorothy tells her embarrassed businesswoman daughter.)

The second last chapter of this book is the one page summary, posted we suppose on some campus Webpage, of great-grand-daughter Dora Bartlett-Deal, enrolled as a fresh(wo)man at Yale, which closes with two quotes ("Favorite Quotes: "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. " -Anais Nin. "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity." -somebody else) and a brief passage "About Me": "My great-great-grandmother starved herself for suffrage. Color me Revolutionary."

The last chapter is elegiac but sad: the suffagist's daughter is eighty-five, wheelchair bound following a massive stroke. A young woman has been sent over from the college to assist her. She has various piercings on her face but is basically all the women in this book seen over again generations later. Nothing has changed. Women still are asked to do too much to justify themselves. Men still don't get them.

This is a wonderful book.

***

So is Ms Hempel Chronicles. I taught in public schools for nine years before I went back to school for my master's, my master's and my doctorate. I loved it. It was, in ways that are difficult to capture, intensely exciting. My first job was teaching Spanish to fourth through sixth-graders, including, to his initial embarrassment, my own brother. I then taught a mix of junior high and senior high classes before ending up in the high school alone. I remember acutely the feelings of inadequacy when I started teaching and he feeling that there never was enough time to prepare adequately and to do a good enough job in assessing student work. I too, and my teacher friends at Olmsted Falls High School, like Ms Hempel and her colleagues, had a secluded bar we retreated to after classes on Friday to unwind. We had our own intrigues and romances in school -my one roommate married another teacher after a year of using our apartment as his "beard" to hide that he and his intended were sleeping together night after night during the school year -heavens! I had the same hopes that Ms Hempel had for my pupils and, like her, I still remember them, even though year after year they moved on and others replaced them.

This book captures better than any other book I've read what it is like to teach in a public school. It's just at the right level, neither too intense and dramatic nor too tepid. Teaching is one of the most absorbing and perilous occupations there is. Every time you step in front of a class, you risk blowing it, and in the process, blowing their lives as well. Ms Hempel, for all her doubts, knows that from the very start.

In a wonderful passage (the chapter is entitled "Yurt"), a former fifth-grade teacher returns to her school. She's leaving the school when she comes across a bulletin board where her former class's artwork is on display. She is energized although it's no longer her class. The new teacher, a novice, has stapled a particular piece so that you can't read the student's name: "Have you seen this? They're overlapping. You can't read them. And he put a staple right through that kid's name.... How are we supposed to know who drew the Minotaur? A child spent hours -hours! --working on this, and you can't even read her name." If you've never taught and haven't become so intense an advocate for your children, you won't understand how this resonates.

I haven't said it yet so I'll say it now. Ms Hempel is one of the most appealing characters I've come across in my reading in recent years. For all the differences between them, I'd put her up there with Jane Austen's Emma, my trademark heroine of modern fiction.

Firstly, I want to start by saying that this was not what I thought it would be. I was expecting the memoir of an English teacher. The book has great reviews and therefore I thought "why not?" Sadly, it wasn't something that caught my attention. I did read the whole book because it really pains me to actually stop reading something I've started - but there was just no point to this. Ms. Hempel is a seventh grade middle school teacher and with a refreshingly real voice gives several insightful thoughts about how teenagers and teachers think mixed in with some tangents about her personal life. She is at that verge where she is questioning everything she's doing with her life and how she is affecting the lives of the children she teaches. This was her quest to find herself - through these short, loosely-linked stories.

On a high note, the writing is beautiful and I can see where this would be a good read for a teacher.

But it just never hit a crescendo for me. I thought the plot meandered and was just too drawn out for me.

If you have ever been a teacher, a student, a dropout, or all three, this book is full of tasty tidbits which will keep you nibbling to the end. And they are really healthy -- good for the circulation and other vital systems! I remember one Ms. Hempel from my high school days in the 1950s -- she dragged her Latin students to see Judith Anderson in Medea. This tale of a witch who slaughters her kids in a frenzy of jealous sexual rage -- wow! Talk about broadening the scope of thought! Ms Bynum does the same outrageous kind of thing in every chapter -- and all for you. Read it. Its fun!

There are, of course, stories that I like the most. "Talent," captures so perfectly the sense of magic and opportunity that youth holds and "Accomplice" remains a haunting, beautiful tribute to Ms. Hempel's father as well as the allegory of the cave.

But what I so greatly appreciated was how the stories all grow in power together. The main character's descriptions of her father - from the shadow scenes in "Accomplice," to the Dracula laugh in "Satellite," to her nightmares of his death in "Sandman," were truly moving. He is just one of the many chords that stream through the work that, at its close, creates a portrait of a young woman who wants to move forward with her life. Yet, she is cursed and blessed with extraordinarily mature powers of reflection.