Tell Me Everything and Other Stories. - Review - book review

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Lynne Kassabian

Joyce Hinnefeld, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press/University Press of New England, 1998

Is it possible to escape a suffocating life? Or does every road lead to a dead end? Joyce Hinnefeld's intriguing first collection, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories, examines the lives of women caught in inescapable circumstances who nevertheless find respite from life's harsh turns. In quiet, lucid tales, her stories chronicle the ties that humans establish, not only with each other but with their surroundings, and celebrate the small triumphs of everyday survival.

Tell Me Everything, which won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize, is comprised of ten stories and four introductory pieces. It is mostly peopled with middle Americans doing the best they can. These folk go to church, work the land, or punch the clock at packing plants, lumberyards, or penitentiaries. Their surroundings are trailer parks, towns near the tracks, or parched, flat land. One of Hinnefeld's preoccupations is unforgiving geography, "landlocked midwestern prairie worlds away from any ocean or sea." Typically oppressive landscapes, such as acres of farmland in "Stories About Miranda," are a grim reminder of blunted opportunities:

   Miles and miles of corn turning brown in the sun. Nothing for her but a job
   in a factory or another farmhouse kitchen, frying bacon and eggs for some
   fat farmer with dirty nails and a big old belly.

Much of the dramatic action in Hinnefeld's stories concerns the need to escape such constricted lives. Sometimes this involves physical action, an exit: one character puts her foot on the accelerator and drives, rather than make sense of guilt and loss after the car accident that killed both parents. Another swims countless laps to numb the anguish of being alone. A third packs her bags, leaves her unresponsive boyfriend, and boards a train. The most successful of these pieces, however, turn on smaller, recognizable gestures as characters seek ways of enduring the airless atmosphere. In "Fallow," a high school teacher is stifled by summer heat, a childless life, and obtuse colleagues. Her view reflects a death of the soul:

   She stared out the window of her empty classroom at the burnt brown grass.
   When the cicadas trilled again, it was as if each blade of grass had
   somehow found a voice and cried out in the agony of this three o'clock
   August heat.

In a world of such narrow possibilities--a recent graduate is already married and working in a factory--the teacher's desperation for rain masks a painful, unspoken despair. Significantly, rain doesn't come. The teacher finds her only catharsis in reading: "Her pulse beat faster and faster, as it always did, as she read up to the critical moment, the letting loose, the flying free of a clenched spring."

Such temporary, deeply felt reprieves characterize Hinnefeld's fiction. Almost Chekhovian in their yearning, her characters' external conditions rarely change. Instead, they often unearth from some buried source a dram of strength:

   He looked strangely content, as if loosening the soil, giving these plants
   room and air to breathe, somehow loosened something in him, too--gave him
   some kind of freedom.

Human connections, however tenuous, provide some relief in Hinnefeld's stories, and she is particularly good at cultivating the difficult terrain that exists between women and men. But permanent bonds are rare in Hinnefeld's world, and sometimes dangerous. This writer can capture, in vivid, poetic terms, the hidden perils of fusion:

   It was the siren song of marriage, the luring call of some wonderful,
   exotic drug, a father's voice, a husband's voice, saying here it all ends,
   here there is safety, and you can be a child, this will be home.

In the finely wrought "Echo Guilt," a writer contemplates "animals that mate for life" even as her ties to her own mate, Jack, weaken after their relocation to the country. Mortality in the form of road-kill and destroyed spider eggs visits the narrator's days as she loses her former identity: "And me writing? It feels like a distant memory, a tune I can barely hear." When the stone farmhouse that symbolizes the couple's future is boarded up, no longer for sale, impending desolation is palpable. Yet, the narrator observes, some bonds, for unfathomable reasons, hold. Hauntingly, no "precise equation" for survival is ever given. Perhaps, the story implies, survival comes down to random luck. Like the squirrels that run across the story's highway, "some make it, and some don't."

What, then, if not human connections, can hush the terrors of being alone? Hinnefeld's stories suggest that, inevitably, one cannot escape one's darkest fears, and that relationships, so inherently fragile, may not be able to withstand them. Another affecting story, "A Thief in the Night," tingles with the dread of impending departure. When Lucy's train breaks down, Joey, a train repairman, invites her home and into his modest life. But there Lucy finds that rather than escape the imprint of her past, she has simply brought her apocalyptic fears with her: "It was this job that she was getting ready for as she dried her hair and listened to the steady whine of what she fully believed to be an announcement of war." And Joey, who knows only too well that trains both arrive and depart, envisions his abandonment: "He lay there watching her ... as if he were afraid that if he looked away, she would suddenly be gone." The piece vibrates with the tension of staying the course, and the reader is caught between hoping that the characters can override what they most dread and fearing that their lives will become self-fulfilled prophesies.