Tumble Home. . - Reviews - Brief Article - book review

TUMBLE HOME by Amy Hempel. New York: Scribner's, 1997. 192 pages. $21 cloth; New York: Scribner's, 1998. 156 pages. $10 paper

At its best, Amy Hempel's fiction offers what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being": "I find that scene-making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative," Woolf wrote in her journal near the end of her life. "At some moments," she wrote, "without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene--for they would not survive so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent." In Tumble Home, a collection of short stories and a novella, Hempel offers scenes made of well-arranged, poignant moments. They're like a powerful dream, the meaning of which may not be clear; you feel that "representative" scene (to use Woolf's terms), but it isn't always clear just what the scene represents.

In many stories, an undefined emotional weight lingers just beneath the surface. Like an Emily Dickinson poem, these stories don't so much conclude as end at a suggestive moment. Take the story "Church Cancels Cow," in which one woman accuses the narrator's dog of defecating on a grave. After the accuser admits that she has counted other grave-defacings in the cemetery, this admission prompts the narrator to recall counting cows, a childhood game she and her brother played "when the family went out on long drives." She remembers that you have to start counting over again when a church appears on your side of the road but her brother reminds her that "it was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow." She understands why she thought of the game, and with this brief resonance, the story concludes.

When the point of a story seemed to have wandered off when I wasn't looking, I found myself sustained by the polished, thoroughly revised prose. These sentences feel strong, lucidly constructed, even minimalist, but minimalist in the best Strunk-and-White fashion. If, as The `Elements of Style tells us, "a sentence should contain no unnecessary words ... for the same reason that ... a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts," so Hempel's sentences are like the spare, clear drawings of the New York Times artist Al Hirschfeld. In a sentence like "The other dogs followed--barking, mutinous," the unadorned prose speaks plainly and directly--no unnecessary lines, no unnecessary parts.

And, as in her earlier collection Reasons to Live (1985), Hempel can be funny, with a sharp sense of the ridiculous that is reminiscent of Lorrie Moore. In the extremely short story "Housewife," we are told: "She would always sleep with her husband and then with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit it by incanting, `French film, French film.'" That's the story in its entirety. It's by far the shortest story in the collection, and indeed, was the shortest story in Micro Fiction (1996), where it first appeared. If this sort of absurdist humor tickles you, then Hempel's wit will appeal.

Unfortunately, the title novella doesn't work as well. An epistolary text, "Tumble Home" tries to work through the unfinished business of current and former relationships, but with limited success. Its narrator tells us, "To me, the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you" and, in striving for this "tumble home," she hopes to find such safety. Without giving away whether or not she finds what she seeks, one can say that the digressiveness of "Tumble Home" distracts. While its meandering narrative is probably intended to represent the narrator's state of mind (and a personal letter is by its nature digressive), these aspects of the novella left this reader lagging behind.

"Tumble Home" aside, the reader who can enjoy Hempel's writing without badgering it for some larger or deeper meaning will enjoy the shorter stories. These are stories that offer an emotional closure even when they lack a clear narrative closure--stories that, like poems, make a suggestion, introduce a moment, and then, allowing these to linger in the mind, leave the reader to make the connection.

PHILIP NEL College of Charleston

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