Ms. Hempel Chronicles

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 (n

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.

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.

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.