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The Physics of Imaginary Objects

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Tina May Hall

September 2010

Kimberly Steele

Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. Such literature is valuable for both its simple sensory pleasure and its faith-restoring powers. Tina May Hall’s The Physics of Imaginary Objects is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you’ll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall’s poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall’s hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious. It is, however, seamless – so delicately woven you forget it ever required stitching in the first place. The words fit together so effortlessly it sometimes feels like they just naturally occurred that way.

Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. Such literature is valuable for both its simple sensory pleasure and its faith-restoring powers. Tina May Hall’s The Physics of Imaginary Objects is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you’ll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall’s poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall’s hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious. It is, however, seamless – so delicately woven you forget it ever required stitching in the first place. The words fit together so effortlessly it sometimes feels like they just naturally occurred that way.

Part of the book’s brilliance is in its structure – a series of independent vignettes – which allows Hall to play around with different formats and styles, showcasing her myriad talents. With the exception of a 50-page novella in the back, most of the tales are extremely short, ranging from 1 to 12 pages. Even the novella, entitled “All the Day’s Sad Stories,” consists of one-page segments that describe different days or moments in one year of a woman’s life. Hall doesn’t need more space to get her point across. She is deeply appreciative of brevity but sacrifices no meaning for her linguistic economy. She is simply expertly accomplished at finding exactly the right word or phrase that conveys an image or emotion better than any other: “When the flour tips off the counter onto the linoleum, their footprints materialize like magic, ghost steps, a diagram for dancing.” This image, too, materializes like magic, and the reader experiences it fully, becomes implicated in it, perhaps even wants to recreate it in order to verify its assumed precision.

The Physics of Imaginary Objects features no shortage of these kinds of “a-ha” moments that hit their perfect stride. Filled with such satisfying little gems, the entire work conveys a sense of generative power, which is appropriate since the book is largely about creation, birth, and the life-bringing force. Many of Hall’s female characters are in some stage of pregnancy or motherhood. One pregnant woman’s heightened senses cause her to become absolutely maddened by the smell of a dead animal rotting within her wall. The odor haunts her until it drives her out of her house entirely, symbolizing all the things in her life she keeps hidden and will one day have to escape. They are all “imaginary objects” that nevertheless exert a steady influence over every aspect of her reality.

The following passage from the short story/series of prose poems, “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Long-Gone Love,” indicates that even loss and destruction can be fruitful:

Winter came and hovered. And with it, a roll call for my lovers:
the sculptor dead, his boot beside the highway, body where? The
boy who wrote me songs, whose guitar-calloused palms went
dark to fair. And back again depending on the season – at night,
dreaming of chords and basketball, those hands would shudder.
Next, there was a poet turned to science, and a second poet, and
another. And him, the thick turned thin, a starling in my attic
(heaven), a single coffee mug, a pair. Him, the one that I mis-
placed somewhere. Except for him, each one I’ve lost, I’ve found
again – as with omens, names, healed-over skin, to forget is to
discover.

Hall’s pace is both measured and intrepid – she does not shy away from incorporating metaphor and fantasy into her otherwise realistic and identifiable stories. She is not afraid of experimenting with form and point of view. She trusts her own storytelling ability and her readers’ basic aesthetic insight. The creativity in her writing will not be deterred. Each separate scenario is abstractly “true” in its own right, but the real thrust of the book is in the novella, which follows a woman named Mercy through her struggles to conceive a baby with her husband, Jake. Everything becomes a “sad story” in this piece, because everything is viewed through Mercy’s lens of longing and lack. She is plagued by an overwhelming emptiness that is the absence of her baby, which is also an “imaginary object.” Everything is colored by nostalgia, need, and the specter of the quintessential, nonexistent child. Even in this longer format, Hall doesn’t abandon her stellar ability to wring every possible connotation out of a simple observation. She says what you’re thinking before you even stop thinking it, or have time to realize that other authors regularly deprive you of this experience. She writes,

Outside, children are shrieking. Mercy remembers a game she
played as a child called “statues” in which the goal was to stay
frozen mid-motion as long as possible. This now strikes her as a
game made up by adults.

A-ha. If you’re looking for moments that resonate with palpable vibrancy, a meeting of the minds over the space of a page, and breath-stopping eloquence that delivers all the best features of poetry and prose, Hall’s The Physics of Imaginary Objects will not disappoint for a single moment. It has earned its place up there on the eye-level shelf of your bookcase.

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