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Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

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Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

by Amy Hempel

4.01 · rating details · 584 ratings · 50 reviews

Long admired for her "tough-minded, original, and fully felt short stories (Sheila Ballyntyne, The New York Times Book Review), Amy Hempel takes her art to new heights in her first remarkable novella -- was well as in her latest collection of stories that comment on life's ironies with decidedly offbeat intelligence.

"As we read, we learn that to discover meaning

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Paperback, 160 pages

Published May 28th 1998 by Scribner (first published 1997)

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May 21, 2010

Keleigh rated it

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 le...more

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Aug 21, 2011

Diann Blakely added it

While Hempel has since published a collection of her fiction, introduced beautifully by Rick Moody, in some ways her magnificent novella, TUMBLE HOME, retains a strong place in my personal literary pantheon, and I've no doubt that this is because she works like a poet. Such attunement to language, whether invented, spoken, or epistolary! (Not to mention the humor.) For example, "I have made friends with the Southerner," we hear from the narrator of TUMBLE HOME, the "Southerner"...more

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Jul 20, 2010

Colin Miller rated it

Shelves: cant-remember-well-enough-to-review, short-stories-novellas

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...moreThree 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.
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Jul 25, 2009

Robert Cooper rated it

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 s...more 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.
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Dec 21, 2011

Clementine rated it

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 ex...more

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May 04, 2011

3rd rated it

A potentially good, loose framework of stories that revolve between poles of flash fiction, the miracle of the commonplace (as if we could expect any more of the short story from Americans after Carver eh?), thanatos' place in arts and madness; all wrecked by the smug refusal of the author to hide her building blocks and refrain from indulging in personal quips (mostly about how much she loves dogs).

Read 'The Annex' and 'The New Lodger', discard the rest. If I sound mean-spirited it's ...more

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Jul 11, 2008

Richard rated it

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.

...moreAmy 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.
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Jan 24, 2011

David Meza rated it

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.

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Apr 13, 2009

Carol rated it

Shelves: 2009

I selected this after seeing Marissa had read several of her books. As I read the dust jacket, I saw that Raymond Carver called her a "precisionist" and I love his short stories. If he gave her notice, she must have talent!
This was an enjoyable book. I especially liked the short story Annex. She has the ability to create mystery and tension in the seemingly everyday.

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Apr 18, 2008

Steven rated it

Shelves: short-stories

I liked "The Annex" best. The last sentence was great and she completely delivered the payoff with that “goddamn shovel.” The tone is managed very closely in this story, and the details accumulate in stealth mode. I also liked "Church Cancels Cow," although it has more the feel of a journal entry than a story. Several of the other pieces in the collection had the feel of journal extracts. Is this becoming a trend? "Sportsman" was the most traditional story of the co...more

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Jan 04, 2012

Wils Cain rated it

I am usually not a fan of short stories but Hempel is such a good writer that I wanted more! The main novella Tumble Home is wonderful. All of the stories in this collection touch on Home.

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Mar 23, 2010

MM rated it

Wow Hempel's great. I can't believe I managed to not read her until now. Every sentence gives you something to grab onto, and her brevity is impressive, beautiful. Loved it.

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Feb 08, 2008

Paul rated it

Shelves: faves

A Book of Little Rough-Cut Gems I was surprised by how many Amy Hempel hits I got when I searched for her name... Amy Hempel has been saddled with that dreadful mantle of being a "writer's writer". To me that says, "She's great but no one knows about her". Why more people don't know about her is kind of a mystery to me, actually. Her stories and as immense in meaning as they are economical on words. Many times, I've read one of her pieces and thought, "Hmmm - What was th...more

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Sep 09, 2009

Kilibird rated it

Amy Hempel has mastered rule 17 in The Elements of Style: Omit needless words.

I have yet to come across a writer who uses verbs with such purpose.

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Dec 24, 2010

Rachel Drew rated it

The novella, Tumble Home, is unexpected and amazing as are a few of the short stories. This collection, however, has some filler.

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Jul 16, 2009

Sarah rated it

Freakin awesome. The Novella is like a 150 page poem. Now I wish I had studied fiction at Bennington and worked with Amy.

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May 12, 2010

Corey rated it

I love her quirky, wee short stories, which are sorta like Donald Barthelme's and sorta like Raymond Carver's. But the title novella here is a tour de force.

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Feb 05, 2009

Mary Lynn rated it

My first look at Amy Hempel. I liked the shorter shorts in this collection better than the novella.

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Mar 08, 2009

Leota rated it

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 f...more

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Jul 23, 2011

Kurt rated it

Weekend is the story I give people as an easy intro into Amy Hempel minimalism.

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Mar 16, 2009

Natasha rated it

Shelves: favorite-books-ever

One of my favorite books in a long time!!!

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Feb 15, 2009

Eva rated it

Shelves: favorites

These are my favorite short stories.

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Jan 29, 2009

Robin rated it

Recommended to Robin by: Hilary

Shelves: shortstories

If you like short stories, read Hempel.

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Mar 21, 2009

Annwang rated it

i almost cried just because it was over--i hate when pretty things end.

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Aug 04, 2011

Allyson rated it

· review of another edition

I really like her writing, but these stories were a little familiar from The New Yorker and her Collected Writings book. She is very clever.

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Jan 10, 2009

Kimmy rated it

For all the lead-up I heard about Hempel, I could only give this book 2 stars. Perhaps without Chuck Pahlaniuk's rabid endorsement, it would've been three. Her stories are well-crafted, but felt too similar from one to another for my taste.

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Mar 21, 2009

Heather rated it

This is an amazing little nibble of a book. Not long, but not a word wasted. A real treasure!

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Jan 23, 2012

Laura rated it

Meh.

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Oct 04, 2007

Marie rated it

Recommends it for: Hempel fans and people with short attention spans

She has these moments of pure brilliance- a certain sentence, sometimes a paragraph- and then sometimes it just ok, which is fine. What really annoyed me was the way the novella Tumble Home ended. I'm not opposed to abrupt endings, but there was something about the way it ended that made it seem like she just forgot.

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Feb 21, 2008

Anne Sanow rated it

I quite liked the novella (Hempel's longest story ever), but too many of the other stories struck me as overly precious. Hempel can have an O.K. book as far as I'm concerned--her other collections rock.

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About Amy Hempel

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 f...more

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“I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!” — 8 people liked it

“I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.” — 7 people liked it

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