Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

by Amy Hempel

Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Novella, Literature, Literary Fiction, Mental Illness, American

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College. Hempel was a former student of Gordon Lish, who eventually helped her publish her first collection of short stories. Hempel has been published in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Bomb. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Ambassador Book Award in 2007, the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2008, and the Pen/Malamud Award for short fiction in 2009.

Reviews

[Emily B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first Amy Hempel book and I was a little disappointed. I found the Novella, tumble home, to be the best part of the book and there were a few quotes which really stood out for me when reading.

The others I didn’t really feel anything towards or I felt like I was missing something

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Hempel's short stories are smoother than the Southern Comfort and bottled (not fountain) Cokes over cocktail ice we juvenilely sipped in red Solo cups on weeknights Freshman year in the Sigma dorms.

Why do the clinically and manically depressed always latch on to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen like an eager infant (or stoic lonely male) to a buxom dame?

Yum.

The plat principal, pas entrée, Tumble Home is humbly masterful.

Not since reading DFW's Forever Overhead has there been such a grand short story to nourish my dopey heart with linguistics.

"I want to know everything about you. So I tell you everything about myself." (105)

Yum.

I would have given this book five stars without batting an eyelash, but i-HATED the story, Housewife, even though it was only ONE SENTENCE LONG.

"She would always sleep with her husband and 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 by incanting, 'French film, French film.'" (53)

Not yum.

"These sounds- this letter- it is my lipstick, my lingerie, my high heels." (72)

"Please excuse the switch to notebook paper; I just ran out of the good stuff." (152)

Yum.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amy Hempel is a writer you don't want to read lazily. Even in her 70+ page title novella, you don't want to flash over a single syllable, for Hempel is an intensive writer of the unsaid, working with both what is on the page and what isn't to convey the complex emotions of her characters. Also, since many of her narrators or narratives are disjointed in some way (or, like in the title novella, unbalanced), their methods of storytelling are often indirect in form, but direct in emotion.

Hempel's clearest strength has to do with the unmediated emotions she creates in her prose. Rather than thoughtful response, she tends to first engage emotionally, throwing us squarely into a character's head, however uncomfortable that may be. In "Sportsman," for example, Jack has been turned out in an act of what he deems as betrayal, and so drives across the country to find solace. He is mistrusting, alone and heartbroken, and Hempel does not filter out what might be unpleasant about his situation for the sake of sentimentality. Instead, she engages it honestly (and wittily) to make Jack and his friends fleshed out and alive.

Not to say that Hempel works only on an emotional level. Her writing clearly has a lot of intellectual appeal. She exhibits great play with language and a magnificent ear for the quirks of conversation (any party scene in this book will hit you with smart dialogue you'll want to emulate), and her writing is surgically prescise, though maybe too precise at times. Stories like "Sportsman" and "Church Cancels Cow" and the novella _Tumble Home_ run a tight wire of meshing their characters and their metaphors without seam, but other stories, like "The Children's Party," end up with forced metaphor, like pieces whose endings feel a little more contrived than organic, but I will credit Hempel here with her successes in this book rather than disparage her for ithe book's faults. It's a short book, but well worth taking your time with, to wring every idea from.

[Kathi Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is how it's done.

[Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of these ‘short stores’ is only one sentence long, which i think is a little lazy.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 2 out of 5]

"This is what happens to me. I start out being myself, and end up being my mother."

A big disappointment! I liked Amy Hempel's set At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom , which - in addition to unremarkable pieces - has three or four memorable stories. Unfortunately I find every story included in Tumble Home (1997) quite unexceptional and the cover blurb that says "Tumble Home is a tour de force" is a misleading statement.

Tumble contains seven short stories - one of them extremely short - and the title novella of about 85 pages. The stories are well-observed slices of life, but there is nothing compelling there, no focal points to hold the readers' attention; they are well-written bagatelles disappointing in their averageness. The microscopic story titled Housewife - it contains only a single sentence! - is particularly feeble: the sentence does not convey any deeper truths nor does it evoke any strong feeling. I love the microscopic story, In the Animal Shelter, from the At the Gates set, which - in just four sentences - tells us a lot about the lives of humans and animals and demonstrates Ms. Hempel's talent. This "story" is just pretentious in its hyperbrevity.

The novella is narrated by a woman, a voluntary patient in a mental institution, who is writing a letter to a famous painter. Although she had met the man just once she uses him as a crutch to help her handle personal problems. As many of the so-called mental patients she is not mentally ill in any way; she just is unable to face the world and cope with the real life. When she was a child her mother committed suicide and now she is one of those millions of people, unloved and unneeded by their parents, whose lives have been damaged and often completely destroyed by their wasted childhood.

I like the novella more than the other stories: it convincingly portrays the maladjusted person's slightly askew view of the outside world and their unconventionally structured thinking with the characteristic jumps in logic and non sequiturs:

"Do you find consolation in a person? In a woman? I found it once with a man, but I lost my combs."

There are a few memorable sentences other than the epigraph quote, for instance:

"A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room."

Yet overall - despite the insightful and well-written novella - the set has little to offer to a reader and the pretentious shortest story is a laughable effort.

Two stars.

[Marisol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tumble home es el tercer libro de Amy Hempel que incluye varios cuentos y una novela corta cuyo título da nombre al libro.

Esta novela ha sido hasta el momento mi texto favorito de todos, pues condensa todas aquellas cosas que nos fue contando en varios cuentos, de tal manera que uno tiene varios deja vu conforme avanza la lectura.

Inicia con una mujer escribiéndole una carta a un enamorado, y en ese tono se da toda la narración, conforme vamos leyendo lo que escribe en la carta, nos enteramos que vive en una casa de reposo para ancianos e inválidos, pero conforme nos va presentando a sus compañeros y sus propios pensamientos, entramos en un ambiente más de centro de terapia psicología, ella ha tenido intentos de suicidio más por ganas que por convicción, su propia madre murió de esta manera, recuerda con cariño a su perro, recuerda con indiferencia a su madre, le da miedo tener hijos, y cuando se siente bien, contrata un taxi para que la lleve a pasear.

La persona a la que escribe la carta es un pintor, y aunque le habla con mucho cariño como si llevaran una relación larga, en algún momento nos enteramos que solo se han visto una hora y realmente no sabemos si existe una relación entre ellos.

Es una novela fascinante, por la manera de contar las cosas, nos va metiendo en una dinámica extraña, dolorosa pero divertida, es como meter la mano en una tómbola y no saber que te tocará, aún cuando muchas cosas te son familiares.

[Keleigh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I kind of hate these stories. A friend recommended Amy Hempel to me, not this particular collection, but raved about one of her short stories as an absolute all-time favorite. So I took a chance on "Tumble Home" when I saw it at a used bookstore and started reading it on a plane ride to Boston. The stories are all supershort and spare, which I generally like, but I felt nothing while reading them. Except vague annoyance. I suppose I'll finish it, as I only have the eponymous novella left, but I'm pretty befuddled as to why she is so lauded. Meh.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not as if these stories are poor, because she writes well enough, but they left me feeling. . .nothing. Which is strange. They just didn't seem to go anywhere. They felt like writing exercises. I hope it is not terrible of me to write this. I suppose some will enjoy them. They could have at least made me laugh, if they weren't going anywhere, or spark some emotion, but they failed to do so. The novella wasn't so bad.

[Cait · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof. I am so disappointed when I say that Hempel and I just did not click, at all. I don't think her writing is awful, but the stories themselves did absolutely nothing for me; in reality I found myself quite bored. I'm not going to give up on her forever though. I have some of her novels, and her collected stories. I will give them a try eventually, but not any time in the near future.

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book kept me guessing but not always in a positive way. I thought the short stories would play into my ADHD well and keep me interested, but I found myself confused by many of them—despite them often being only two pages! It worked some of the time, though.

Some lines of this book just struck me as so uniquely beautiful that I would stop and sit with them for a few minutes. I really enjoyed that part of my reading experience. I will say, I probably wouldn’t read more of Hempel’s work. This was a challenge and I think I need just a slight bit more of a “point” in a lot of my literature. That’s probably surprising given my propensity to read nihilistic mundane books lately, but who are you to judge??

[Eugenea Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Hempel’s short stories are in the same league with those of the 2013 Nobel laureate, Alice Munro; so I have devoured three of her collections thus far. This one contains one of the most compelling and disturbing examples of her work: her novella, “Tumble Home”, in which the narrator addresses an absent former lover from her current abode, a residential psychiatric facility. Never quite sure what was real, what was imagined by the narrator, what originated in staff or fellow patients’ assumptions, I was fascinated by this puzzle-world to the very end.

[Nick Knittel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories: not bad.
The novella: god damn.

[Cooper Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains seven short stories and a novella by American writer Amy Hempel. Actually, the short stories are more like vignettes; they concern themselves with the minutiae of middle class life in America—what folks talk about and do at a children’s party, for instance. Hempel listens and observes well, but I don’t find these pieces particularly compelling—more like thin slices of life that are quickly scarfed and excreted in toto. No existential tang, little after-taste. All of the stories are in essentially the same style, in which I discern the influence of Gordon Lish (and indeed, according to the book’s jacket Hempel has published in Lish’s magazine The Quarterly), along with the distant voices of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.
The novella (Tumble Home) is much more impressive than the vignettes. The story is in letter form (“epistolary novel”): a young woman in a sanitarium is writing to a famous painter she once had coffee with, hoping, by revealing her inner life, to inspire a deeper relationship. She tells about her mother, a loony and apparently unpleasant artist who committed suicide when the writer was sixteen, and a bit about her father, and also about the man she’s addressing the letter to, but mostly she describes the banter in the sanitarium between her best friend Chatty, a zany woman from Texas, and good pal Warren, a man with many jokes and a tart tongue. The sanitarium seems quite a pleasant place and the patients are free to leave whenever they like; the writer never really tells what brought them there. There are many interesting observations in this novella and some fine descriptions: I found that it held my interest throughout.
All of these writing samples are from Tumble Home:

And what if you don’t like the person you are? Where do you find the parts to make yourself into some other kind of person? Can it be something you read in a book, a gesture you see on the street? Half-smile of a teacher, the walk of a girl on the beach.

I would like to go to a matinee with you. Any afternoon, any theatre,
I would not care what we saw. I would like to sit next to you in the dark in a public place and lean over from time to time to better hear your caustic asides.

Surely it is part of the medication, but we have hung our libidos on hooks outside the door. Do men play a version of the game women do, when a woman asks herself in, say, a shopping center, If I had to go to bed with someone in this store, which one would it be? Here, Warren is the best of the lot. If I can return to the high school mixer, a girl would go up to another girl and say of one of the boys, “He’s really cute.” And suddenly the girl to whom this was said, a girl who had not previously noticed this fellow, was taking another look and thinking to herself, “He is really cute.”

It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, “I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you—“
“My eyes are blue,” I said.

[Colin Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars:

Collected Stories review:

Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories starts with my favorite short story collection ever, Reasons to Live, and then proceeds to highlight the author’s decline to mediocrity.

Don’t get me wrong; ask me who the best short story writer is and I’ll still say Amy Hempel, but sometimes you have to be honest, even about the people you admire most. Like many who got into Hempel prior to the rabid Chuck Palahniuk endorsement, I was hooked by the widely anthologized “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” and it’s still in my top-five short stories along with “The Man in Bogota.” Both are from Reasons to Live, and if giving a top-ten list, there’s a good chance that a couple more stories from that collection would crowd it out. It’s one of the rare books that I’ve given five stars to for a reason (pun unintended).

At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom is still excellent. A four-star run. The fact that it’s out of print—and harder to find than Reasons to Live--is another checkmark to picking up the nicely priced and complete Collected Stories, but alas the decline continues: Tumble Home is uneven, but still clocks in at a recommendable three-star level. It’s The Dog of the Marriage that puts the final decline point on the chart, barely crossing the two-star mark. That’s where I was left missing the Amy Hempel who used to make me not what to think after reading her stories—letting the feeling of what she put into me stay for just a little longer—and I wonder if she might have put all that she could into the first collection around and was simply mimicking the success.

I still recommend Collected Stories, but I never know where to tell people to pull the bookmark. There are other writers out there—writers who are going up, not coming down—but for a while there, Amy Hempel was all I needed. The desert island choice. I know these expectations aren’t fair, but the feeling is there regardless. Three stars, but reaching higher.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first collection of Amy Hempel's writing I have read, my only other exposure being the book of dog poetry - "Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...) - she co-edited with Jim Shepard - and I enjoyed the vividness of individual phrases. Many of her stories seem as aimless as her characters, however, and I found myself drifting in and out of focus (and consciousness) as I read them. This was not always unpleasant, since I would return, dreamlike, to the last word I remembered and then proceed, lost in the formlessness of the main character's state of being.

I think Hempel's style is best suited to the shorter of her stories. The title novella, "Tumble Home," was less well served by the loose narrative construction, although I still found it poignant, at times. My two favorites of the collection are "The Children's Party" and "Sportsman." Even when I found her stories less than gripping, I always enjoyed how she worked her love of dogs into almost every one.

[CP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Hempel is a role model and inspiration for Chuck Palahniuk and having finally got my hands on a copy of her work, I was anticipating great things; she did not disappoint.
Her writing is captivating and each short story left me wanting to know what happens both before and after the small part of the characters’ lives she allows us in on. The novella was gorgeously written; I was close to tears at least once and laughed out loud at least an equal amount of times.
I honestly cannot exactly express what is so special about her writing, but believe me, give it a try. Especially if you love Chuck, she’s just as talented and simply a lot more wholesome!

[Teresatobin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious. This author is one of those that likes to write about the the small and mundane in incredible detail and length and we are supposed to be impressed by their prose and language - I was not. On a side note the characters read so privileged to me. Some of the themes are universal (love, loss, illness) but all I could think is imagine dealing with this and having a broken car or not being able to pay rent. These people have problems and they have the wealth and privilege to explore them in excruciating detail. I usually like short stories/novellas but there is no theme or plot to any of them singularly or together.

There is one really good line about tulips :)

[Leota · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved, loved, LOVED Amy Hempel's first book, "Reasons to Live", so it's safe to say my expectations for "Tumble Home" were pretty high. They...were not met. Something just isn't there with this collection. Maybe it's that sense of urgancy that's missing, maybe it's because every story has a dog in it (seriously. I bet you could make a pretty good drinking game out of this book if you took a shot everytime a dog was mentioned)...I don't know. All I know is that this was a fairly forgettable book of short stories, and left me feeling disappointed.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing short story writer. And by short, I mean way short. Hempel can do in a few pages and in single sentences what other authors need pages for. No words wasted, her stories read like poetry with a huge dose of humor. She finds tension and hilarity in the everyday and opens your eyes to pay attention to the things in life you might otherwise miss. Can't wait to read her writing again. Highly recommended!

[j2c6 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Después de leer 'Razones para vivir' y 'A las puertas del reino animal', encantado con Hempel, me meto en su 'Tumble Home' que contiene algunos relatos cortos y una "novella" de 70 páginas. La novela, aunque está bien escrita, no me ha hecho conectar tanto, han sido más 'Iglesia anula vaca', 'La fiesta infantil', 'Espíritu Deportivo' y 'Ama de casa' los que me llevan a su línea de siempre. Seguiremos con 'El perro del matrimonio' el último que me queda de ella.

[David Meza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though well written, this book seemed to be a collection of obscure and interchangeable short stories, followed by a novela that hardly provided and sustenance. This is my first reading of Hemple, following a friend's recommendation, but the entire time I felt a presence of a disgruntled stay-at-home wife and mother who longed for more: though she herself was unsure of what her end-game was.

[Arnoldo Rosas · Rating 5 out of 5]

La cotidianidad. Siempre la terrible cotidianidad. Y una mirada llena de afecto.

[Eric Hollen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

My first Amy Hempel collection. Of course, I've heard a lot about her from writer friends who really admire her, and some of these stories really hold up. She has a very particular way of writing about the world, often finding interest in "trivia" and other interesting bits of information she scaffolds her stories around, as well as dogs and other animals. I really enjoyed some of the earlier stories, but wasn't too keen on the last one, the novella titled "Tumble Home." Maybe to me it just felt a little formless after the sharpness of some of the earlier stuff. For a relatively short collection (150 pages) it also took up the majority of the collection, at nearly 90 pages.

Why wasn't I keen on it? Not sure. Maybe I just didn't feel like it had the usual borders of a short story to make it interesting or particularly engaging. There were parts of me that wasn't sure about the framing, the story taking place in a psych ward, being addressed to a famous artist. I mean, the stuff about the narrator and her father visiting a famous artist on Christmas felt much more interesting. Part of me wonders if this is the rare story that I wish had been told in summary, with the father, the artist, and even the mother being the character relationships explored, instead of the other characters at the ward. Anyways, might just be one of those stories I'll appreciate years down the road when I (inevitably) re-read her again.

[Dena · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She said she had so many friends, and always remembered which sorrow went with which person.” (46)

“I never had a swimming pool; I swam in a willow-ringed pond. My favorite thing is staying in the longest when a thunderstorm struck (She is the smallest child who swings the highest my mother once wrote in a letter to my father). What can I say about myself today? That I am the last to close a window when it rains.” (88)

“Summer slows us down. Does it slow you down, too? I like to close a book I’ve been reading on the porch and picture you swimming in your backyard pool. I see you swimming alone, with no one waiting to wrap you in a robe when you climb out. This letter is a robe I hold out to you.” (97)

“I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!” (148)

[Theresa]

Hempel's writing reminds me of Joy Williams' stories. Imaginative, clever, stream of consciousness . . . these 2 lines from page 82 seem to sum up one of Hempel's objectives: "You know how most of us don't say things in a memorable way? The way everything sounds already handled by everyone else?"

She does create some great sentences, but I don't find her stories that memorable and I find myself not being able to say what her stories are about - other than stream of consciousness or quirky observations.

The Children's Party, one of the short stories in the book, was the most familiar for me. It is like what I hear when my neighbor has a party. It's a good example of what I hear from behind the high wooden fence that separates me from the party goers; I can't see them, but I can hear snippets of conversation.

[Ed Scherrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short fiction precisely crafted as a pocket watch and as eccentric as the person who uses one. The title story is an epistolary novella set in an asylum---not a Victorian Gothic, but ostensibly occurring in the 1990s! How's that for an ironic embrace of antiquity? It's a work of unfamiliar genius. Perhaps all personal history is something distant and unintelligible; its translation, an incapacitating task that leaves us with a minimalist collage of images and Delphic musings. That the 1997 collection is dedicated to the author's siblings is telling: it floats on the invisible currents of inside jokes and insinuations, a private language of households lost in time. Think John Cheever's Hamptons but with a poet's deliberation: with every plunge of the garden trowel, Hempel chimes against a lost trinket that is at once beautiful, hilarious, and sad.

[Paul Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely written short stories. One about a guy who separates from his wife and drives across country to visit friends and coalesce. Another about a guy who visits a beach resort he has frequented and has a bite to eat in the local bar and writes postcards. A scenic story of friendly families who have beach or lake houses near each other.

The novella wasn’t as good. My sense is that the author’s expertise is short stories, and she went too long. One of her talents is an economy of words.

I’d like to read more of her short storiesz

[freckledbibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tumble Home was an introduction to Amy Hempel's work. I adored this slim book. Hempel indited a simple read that proffered a face to the everyday moments of life, whether poignant, fascinating and also amusing even when dealing with a crucial issue as mental illness.

Hempel allowed the reader to sit back and regard the most trivial of things. Her writing style is unique, almost as if the reader is inside her dreams.

I look forward to reading more of Amy Hempel's work.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why I thought Hempel would be any more lighthearted than another writer for her use of dog anecdotes, but whatever levity they do add is comedy before tragedy. This collection is beautifully written and well-worth the time to read. While one may wish to taste the words instead of simply swallowing them, this could be a single-sitting book for the faster readers among us. My favorite stories in the collection are: The Children's Part, The Annex, and Tumble Home.