Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

In keeping with its minimalist content, Amy Hempel's latest collection of seven stories and a novella weighs in at a slim 155 pages; what the book lacks in heft, however, it more than makes up for in mood. Hempel, the author of two other short-story collections, is a master of witty understatement. In "The Children's Party," the narrator gives some advice to a father whose children feel that getting a new dog after the old one was killed would be disloyal: "'Tell them this: The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old,'" to which the father replies, "'That's what I used to tell myself when I cheated on my ex-wife.'" In Hempel's stories, nothing much happens, yet everything changes.

The collection's title is taken from the novella, in which a woman committed to a psychiatric institution writes a letter to a famous painter she has only met once. The letter is written over the course of several days, and as the writer chronicles her life among the other patients, she reveals her wounded psyche and her struggle to find home, "the place where nothing can touch you." In one way or another, all of Hempel's characters are looking for home, but there is nothing epic in their voyages of discovery; rather, it is in the little things--the touch of an unshaven cheek, a school of bluefish leaping in the surf, a baby's grave--that Hempel captures a whole world of feeling.

This collection of stories explores characters who define themselves primarily through loss, especially loss revolving around "home." The narrator in "The New Lodger" returns to a familiar town but forgoes reunions and instead writes her friends postcards, to make her feel the "pull of the old home, pulling apart the new." In "The Annex," a new home owner establishes her sense of place in relation to a premature baby's gravesite, across the street, and to its still grieving mother. This and other stories, most only a few pages, are warm-ups for the novella, conceived as a letter by a young woman recovering in a rehabilitation facility, written to an artist she's seen once, briefly. The narrator struggles to define herself in relation to her mother, who has taken her own life, and the letter serves as narrative therapy, tracing the parallel challenges of self-understanding and narrative coherence--"No right place to begin" --and the relief of humor and wordplay--"Art has drawing power" --as well as the subtle perceptual shifts that can mark character transformation. Through these last Hemple deftly angles us into her character's world. Jim O'Laughlin

Hempel's third volume of precious miniatures (At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, 1990, etc.) includes a novella that reads like an inflated version of its short, fragile companion pieces, one no more than a paragraph long. Which would be fine if that paragraph (``Housewife'') were a finely etched, poetically dense bit of prose, but it's just short and rather silly. The six other pieces, some a page or two long, are offered in support of Hempel's claim that the miraculous abides in the ordinary, which here seems to mean scenes of domesticity, full of babies, children's games, and dogs. ``Church Cancels Cow'' and ``The Annex'' both concern the narrator's house, set across the street from a cemetery, where, we learn, one can watch dogs roaming and where a headstone for a dead baby is visible from every room. Summer resorts are the settings for three vignettes: ``Weekend,'' an idyll spoiled only when the men leave for work on Monday; ``The Children's Party,'' which features a moose sighting; and ``The New Lodger,'' the narrator's return to the site of past loves. The longer ``Sportsman'' chronicles a rough patch in a marriage, which the husband deals with by heading east to stay with friends on Long Island. The title novella is an extended letter written by the narrator from a sanitarium, and reflects the bitter patter of mental patients, odd comments hinting of deeper meanings. She writes to a famous painter with whom she once had tea, and tells him about her fellow ``guests'' at the former girls' school, such as Chatty, the southern belle and telepathic healer. The narrator fills her time by walking dogs from a nearby shelter and brooding on her mother, a frustrated artist who committed suicide. These ramblings try to impress with their sensitivity to ``objects in the world,'' but come across as an accumulation of scattered bits. Tales much like the poetry Hempel quotes: imagistic with no emotional or aesthetic heft, nor even a particular sensitivity to language. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A collection of stories portrays a variety of characters whose vision is slightly skewed and whose inner logic keeps leading them to make bad decisions as they become obsessed and irrational about the places they call home. 15,000 first printing.

Amy Hempel is the author of Tumble Home, Reasons to Live, and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper's, Playboy, The Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and lives in New York City.