Vicious Spring
by Hollis Hampton-JonesRiverhead Books, 182 pp., $21.95
“It’s the last day of school, so I took a hit of acid.” And we’re off. From line one of Hollis Hampton-Jones’ slim debut, there’s little doubt as to what we’re in for. Christy’s first-person teenage narration is enough to toughen the edges of even the mildest novel, not to mention one already lacquered with drugs, strip clubs, and a dad who wants to be your sexual-exploit confidante so he can wank off to the stories later with the kid next door. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Christy has just finished high school in Nashville. She is already knee-deep in a drug habit and budding promiscuity. Her rebellious younger sister, Lizzie, and her pot-smoking father are arguably responsible for what little sense of grounding she does have, but both bonds are promptly yanked from under her (one of them for reasons mentioned above) early in the novel’s calculated schedule of calamity. Before long she has taken a job at the strip joint where her 32-year-old boyfriend, Del, works as a bouncer. It’s all downhill from there, as they say. And I really wanted to tumble with her, down the breakneck incline that seems to be the novel’s pointed raison d’être. But my balance was far too rarely thrown.
Everything about this book — the racy subject matter, the present-tense prose, the episodic form, and the dramatic use of white space — points to an edgy, emotional train wreck of a tale. And yet there I was, not caring nearly enough. Largely responsible is the degree of detachment in Christy’s narration. There’s such a deep, unknowable canyon between what is actually happening, what Christy might or might not be experiencing emotionally, and what she deigns to reveal from her distant cave of escapism. The novel is most satisfying when cracks are allowed to form in its voice. The stakes are thereby momentarily raised, for we get a tenuous jelling of the hardships being suffered and the voice of she who suffers them — a connection we have been craving from the beginning. After all, who wants to read a story about a train wreck, if you don’t know anyone on the train?
This article appears in June 20 • 2003.