Pictures of Houses with Water Damage

The short stories in Michael Hemmingson's Pictures of Houses with Water Damage offer a disturbing, sometimes harrowing, portrayal of human relationships. Like water seeping down behind plaster walls, once the problems come into the open, it's already too late.

The short stories in Michael Hemmingson's Pictures of Houses with Water Damage offer a disturbing, sometimes harrowing, portrayal of human relationships. Like water seeping down behind plaster walls, once the problems come into the open, it's already too late.

Hemmingson’s language is terse to the point of evasiveness. He forgoes physical description to focus solely on dialogue and interaction between his characters. The style is effective, creating a detached tone of resignation and bewilderment which permeates most of the stories yet still delivering emotional impact.

There is an element of hard-boiled noir fiction in Hemmingson's writing, strongly evidenced in one of his earlier novels, Wild Turkey, a tale of murder, deception and sex. In this collection, we're dropped into a similar world, where every character seems to be holding a drink, drugs, or a gun; your spouse is always cheating; and the only way out is down. But whereas Wild Turkey reveled in genre conventions for their own sake, the narrow focus of these short stories gives them added impact; the violence and sex only rarely feels gratuitous. In “Looking for Wanda Beyond the Salton Sea,” for example, a disappearing wife plot straight from Hitchcock ends in a disturbing twist which deflates any pretension of masculine heroics:

No one knows a Wanda, has seen a Wanda.

He gets drunk and angry.

Maybe she doesn’t exist, a bartender says just before David is 86’ed out.

What? What’s that? David goes.

Maybe you made her up, says the bartender, I mean, really, dude, what kind of woman would want to be with a loudmouth asshole like you?

Ultimately, it serves a greater purpose, giving the reader a view of the world in which social conventions are only a thin veneer over the unending, almost primal struggles of human interaction. The family unit, in Hemmingson's world, is always under threat, mostly from within. Husbands and wives are trapped together and each looking for their own way out. Children are the result of bad decisions. Hemmingson's protagonists, usually male, are useless when it comes to dealing with the problems that confront them, displaying at best a certain passive-aggressiveness. Forgiveness is used as a weapon.

But there is something that keeps pulling us back, something which needs family, companionship and love, no matter how irrational. In “Why Don’t You Use Your Parking Space,” keeping a baby is a spark of defiance in the face of an ugly, violent world. Elsewhere, the men who flee into dark fantasies of drugs and rape rather than face the responsibilities of fatherhood sometimes do come back, albeit reluctantly and always keeping one eye on the door. Much of Hemmingson's work revolves around an unspoken and desperate need for love and these stories address what goes on in its absence, in the yawning void between what life should be and what it is.

In “Solid Memories have the Life Span of Tulips and Sunflowers,” Hemmingson displays a gift for the surreal and it imbues his tale of recovered memory and regret with a certain tenderness (a gift also on display in “It’s Very Cold Down Here,” but in a wholly comic vein). The narrator, David, seems to travel on a different plane from everyone around him, not cynically detached but simply out-of-step. When his girlfriend tells him she's been seeing someone else, his calm is almost heroic:

“You're not bothered?”

“Only by my memories,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder how accurate they are.”

She had an incredulous look on her face. “I could be leaving you!”

“I know.”

“David,” she said.

“Yes?”

“If we'd gotten married,” she said, and said no more.

The tension and despair of what could have been and what could have been lost carries more weight when left unsaid. But ultimately, Hemmingson's characters find a way to navigate the shallow waters—to cope, to compromise. It's the struggle he finds admirable, the seeking after of something greater than ourselves. As he writes in “Forbidden Scenes of Affection”:

I put my head on her stomach and felt her baby kick. I heard sounds in there. “Life,” I said, because I didn't know what the word meant. “The garden and the fruit.”