A Time of Magic
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
A Time of Magic Ms. Hempel Chronicles By Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Harcourt. 193 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Managing editor, New York “Times Magazine”; author, “The Fact...
...her success as a teacher is in part due to her complicity with her students: “She had chosen teaching because it seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something generous and worthwhile...
...It recounts a fairy tale-like dream-within-a-dream...
...So what can we do...
...Hempel stories appeared separately in journals and collections from 2004 to 2008, while Madeleine Is Sleeping appeared as a book in 2004...
...Bynum wisely leaves unstressed the echo of this imaginedrescue in Ms...
...one of them exclaims at the thought oflife'spossibilities, clapping "herhands rapturously against her thighs, as though her shorts had caught fire...
...Hempel wishes she couldhave rescued him in adolescence and taught him the delights of the simpler range of pleasures she is fluent in...
...Madeleine was foreign in place and time, which made it more possible to accept the challenges it posed to linear narrative structure and reason...
...Am I supposed to tell my kids, 'Okay, I'm off to answer phones at an insurance company...
...Because we can't leave to make more money...
...The mixed Chinese and American marriage of Beatrice's parents falls apart in a place that seems a lot like 1980s California...
...The bodies of Ms...
...Just imagine...
...Hempel is not quite grown up...
...Bynum's approach in the two books is very different as well...
...Too late she realized her mistake...
...She is interested in and tolerates their oddness as they disappear into the chrysalis of their teenage years and then re-emerge...
...Hempel is envious that her former colleague has found a route out of teaching...
...teaching had invaded her like a mild but inexorable infection...
...Hempel released to her new life, and a new cocooning, albeit not that of adolescence: "She'd wake up late in the morning, throbbing with surprise and pleasure, aghast at what her subconscious was capable of...
...author, “The Fact Checker’s Bible” THIS BOOK’S eight funny, astute, beautifully written stories form a Bildungsroman of sorts...
...You are...
...A few years later, as a 10th grader, he has revived playing the didgeridoo to ecstatic applause at a school talent show...
...Teaching, Bynum suggests, is a cocoon of the wrong sort for her, a delightful trap from which it is difficult to emerge...
...Hempel Bynum occasionally seems to get the tone wrong, notably when her realism seems too dominated by the imagination or when the realism veers too far toward the literal...
...Zadie Smith's White Teeth, for example, came out before The Autograph Man, her second and less accomplished novel, probably because it was in fact written earlier...
...presumably the author was working on the two projects concurrently for several years...
...She was caught, again,” she reflects, “in an awkward position: still young enough to decipher the lyrics, yet old enough to feel that a certain degree of outrage was required of her...
...In its allegory, poetic language and imagery, Madeleine Is Sleeping is a highly unusual, almost foreign work that reads as if it was very carefully translated from the French or maybe the Czech...
...Her nostalgia and sympathy, however, are for her lost youth...
...It is highly allusive, referring not only to Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeleine and the Gypsies, beloved by so many Americans, but to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell’s Baroque and Rococo...
...We can always...
...Hempel Chronicles—poetic language, concern with the imagination, emergent sexual drives both innocent and more perverse—the new work has a trickier stunt to pull off in blending fantasy with modernity...
...Hempel's students often did that: fly off in strange directions, seemingly of their own accord...
...Though engaged to be married and living with her boyfriend, Ms...
...Hempel Chronicles contains autobiographical elements, but perhaps nowhere more than in this admission of the richness and peculiarity of her dreams, which have yielded quite different yet equally successful and resonant books...
...Duffy cannot quite let go either...
...And we can't leave to do something easier, some nice quiet job in an office...
...Although I can’t say those references were old hat to me, I recognized the sophisticated scent of distinctly European critical thought...
...Despite the obvious similarities between Madeleine Is Sleeping and Ms...
...He moved "with a languor that sometimes slowed into complete suspension...
...Why didn't I think ofthat?' She had imagined a body cast instead...
...Hempel Chronicles is distinctly a product of a more familiar time and place...
...The Ms...
...Hempel Chronicles, but is rooted more firmly in a recognizable world...
...Perhaps its jarring effect is intended to underscore her heroine's predicament...
...Thus is Ms...
...Duffy's belly...
...Then she couldn’t be held responsible...
...She visits the classroom where she used to reign and starts to correct the new teacher's spelling and punctuation...
...that's despicable...
...Her satisfaction is the most profoundly realized aspect of the book: "A slow warmth suffused Beatrice's face, her body—she felt as if she'd been set alight...
...Listening to a pop song students had chosen to accompany a dance routine in assembly, Ms...
...If only she were truly adult, so that the words were unintelligible, the volume unbearable...
...In this and other scenes, Bynum perceptively caricatures the control obsession of career instructors while sympathizing with their horror at misplaced apostrophes...
...Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s title character, Beatrice Hempel, is a young teacher at a private school in an unnamed city...
...Hempel's engagement has been broken, for reasons both vague and specific, and a former teacher who is pregnant returns to visit the school before leaving the city to make her home in a yurt (a Mongolian-type structure) upstate...
...Publishing your first novel second may be a trend...
...that would be so embarrassing...
...Bynum portrays adolescence as a time of magic, when children are not subject to ordinary laws of nature...
...You're brilliant,'" she tells Ms...
...In Ms...
...In the book's final story, "Bump," when Ms...
...A maiden, possibly recovering from a cruel punishment for a sexual transgression, sleeps interminably, and in her sleep imagines traveling with a troupe of misfits, each compelled by intense, unusual desires...
...One such student, described with humor and affection, is Edward Ashe, a former piano prodigy who had composed his own ragtime waltzes, but sat virtually catatonic in class...
...her students now inhabited her dreams, her privacy, her language...
...In a story entitled "Yurt," published originally in the New Yorker, Ms...
...The latter is especially jarring where the subject is sex...
...Other events—the death of her father, an unexpected kiss, her mother’s decision to turn her childhood home in to a bed-and-breakfast—make it increasingly obvious that Ms...
...Bynum is wonderful describing the sensual and the erotic, but the language of her more graphic sexual references seems to be spoken from another sensibility...
...Yet Ms...
...I half expected to find a blurb from Julia Kristeva on the back cover...
...Bynum’s previously published novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, also was made up of short chapters, some only a few sentences long...
...It is easy to assume that Ms...
...Hempel Chronicles, though one could trace strands of a common sensibility from the first book to the second—if the order of their publication is the order in which they were written...
...Hempel and her student have both graduated to new lives, she learns of her impact on him and it is clear that she succeeded in rescuing him...
...Hempel is being forced into a more mature and active state...
...Hempel loves her students...
...Hempel recognizes its explicit meaning, but the performers’ parents do not...
...Not so with Ms...
...Hempel is at odds with her fiancé in bed: She aspires to "warm bodies in the dark, sighing andrustling, then arcing up in perfect tandem, like synchronized swimmers," while his ideal "involved something much more strenuous and well lit and out of the ordinary...
...she herself had fantasized about having a debilitating accident in order to escape...
...After revealing her strengths and weaknesses in the classroom, Bynum ultimately sees her on the way to a new life...
...Hempel gestured helplessly at Ms...
...It's impossible...
...Duffy...
...Hempel's nurturing of a teenage student, to whom she offers unconventionally expressed warmth and appreciation of his "wildness and beauty and torment...
...Where Bynum's Madeleine has a premodern European quality, Ms...
...Her sympathy for the entranced self-absorbed uncommunicative state of adolescence is apparent again in Ms...
...Hempel is witness to the magical transformations of adolescence, but is somehow set apart from it...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
