‘The New Lodger’ by Amy Hempel

The New Lodger by Amy Hempel, 1998

The magic trick:

Using a fairly obvious metaphor but never really explaining the overall takeaway

Another Amy Hempel Week here on the magic tricks website.

“The New Lodger” is not her strongest selection, truth be told. It treads familiar Hempel ground of the past intersecting with the present. The case it lays out along those lines is fairly obvious. A woman is returning to a place where she has been before. It’s difficult to get to. She’s incurred unpleasantness and even danger during her previous visits. She doesn’t need any souvenirs or tourist crap to sentimentalize the locale.

OK.

It’s a pretty straightforward metaphor that never really explains where it’s going. And that’s quite a trick on Hempel’s part.

The selection:

Farther up the coast is where you have to go for stuffed plush whales and orange rubber crabs, for T-shirts and mugs, placemat maps. Postcards are what the store can manage. That’s okay with me. I don’t have to hunt up souvenirs. It is enough to feel the pull of the old home, pulling apart the new.

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