A reading of her second collection convinces me that ''miniaturist'' would be a more accurate term, implying as it does someone whose fiction is marked not by spareness of treatment or the absence of affect or motivation but rather by an almost miraculous exactitude of observation and execution. Amy Hempel does indeed work on a very small scale - on a couple of inches, so to speak, of ivory or porcelain. The narrator, Big Guy's teen-age girlfriend, regales us with examples of the boy's eccentricity. With blue thread he stitches the girl's name into the calloused skin on his thumb. He cooks corn by placing the opened can on the burner and for breakfast pours milk into the cardboard boxes of Kellogg's miniature assortment.
Dots is spots up close.
But undercutting all of this adolescent foolery is the fact, revealed early in the piece, that Big Guy's mother has, only a few days before, hanged herself. The combination of comedy and loss is pervasive. They spend their time mordantly reminiscing about lovers or husbands or parts of their bodies they have lost or are about to lose. Jean said she thought she might still hear from Larry but that hoping he would call was like the praying you do after the bowling ball has left your hand.'' In other pieces the pain is mitigated by the chiseled perfection of the small paragraphs that form the units of Amy Hempel's lapidary art. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.