Book Review: Pictures of Houses with Water Damage

Anticipating a review of Joe Dornich’s short story collection, The Ways We Get By, I’m posting these thoughts on an earlier Black Lawrence Press publication of Michael Hemmingson’s shorts. Both books put BLP on top for giving us an off-beat view of the truth, at once humorous, maddening, tragic, and spare.

There’s a world of hurt in Michael Hemmingson’s collection Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (2010), a numbed kind of pain felt after a breakup, whether you wanted to break up or not–or didn’t know what you wanted either way.

The pain Hemmingson awakens can’t be cured with booze, with sex, with a new affair, though every one of his characters seems to try. They get an A+ for trying, but it’s the collection itself that holds the numbing properties and brings the cure.

The 21 stories show in kaleidoscopic form the life, as lives, of an individual confronting the fallout of unrepentant infidelity, unwanted pregnancy, alcohol dependence, failed marriage; we watch lives wrecked by emotional pain, rendered faithfully through the eyes of a cuckold, a cheatwife, a wounded vet boyfriend, a lonely lurking neighbor, a half-grown child, an honest husband, a roommate.

These lives amid the detritus of failure are rendered in spare, revelatory prose. Take Cyclops: “The eye was lost in a freak fishing accident… A shining hook winked at him, swooped down and took his eye.”

Brilliant muscle drives clean lines that use simplicity to explain the complex. In Adventure: how could his wife do that with a complete stranger? “Our marriage has dulled.” “Have there been others?” “Yes.”

I see the defining sentiment two ways. In Forbidden Scenes of Affection: “From the outside, there was nothing wrong with a man and a woman, naked, lying on a bed. But when you got the details, the scene became distorted, if not grotesque.” So many details. The woman, several weeks pregnant, lays with her lover. He’s not her only lover. After the baby comes, she becomes his lover again. The husband, the father, he is barely a person—he looks like a nice guy but he can be an asshole. “Sometimes he hits me.”

Hemming son hasn’t fouled his lines with pity, not even for the cuckold. He gets what he gets, and so does his cheating pregnant wife.

The defining sentiment might be simply this: “Something always kills dreams.”

Is this a gift? It’s certainly a talent. It’s a dark art. I came to the end eager to write up something nice about the author, only to learn he’s passed. Just like Michael Hemmingson to leave us thirsty for more.

Good thing we have writers like Joe Dornich to keep the fire burning.

##