Reviewed by Laurel Shimasaki
A conversational novella told in chapters that could easily stand alone as flash fiction stories, Claire Hopple's Tell Me How You Really Feel centers around the fractured daily lives of family members in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. And that's the problem with summaries. From this innocuous description, it sounds as though everything in this book is miniature in stature when the effect is anything but. And yet, the plot of this novella remains hard to explain. Is there one? Not convincingly. That's fitting, considering that Tell Me How You Really Feel is published by Maudlin House, a Chicago-based small press whose mission is to serve as "a bridge between new form fiction and experimental lit that takes on mainstream pop culture through the lens of 21st-century indie art."
The most obvious way in which Tell Me How You Really Feel is experimental literature is that the novella eschews Freytag's pyramid mode of storytelling. Australian novelist Nigel Krauth wrote "If one needs a short cut to understanding the nature of the Radical in literature, one might think first about concepts related to the singular, the linear, the beginning-middle-and-end structure, and think how a writer can replace them with multiplicity, collage or a rhizome of fragments." Jumping through time and perspective, a rhizome of fragments is absolutely the story structure at work in Tell Me How You Really Feel.
Each chapter magnifies a moment in which characters try to keep it together despite the snare they have unwittingly built for themselves. Mallory, friendless in a new city, tries to be more social by selecting whoever is nearest, doubts be damned. By damning her doubts, she disregards her own dignity. Cousin Joe's girlfriend disappears, though what actually happened is less mysterious and more bewildering about his basic ability to maintain a relationship. A feud between Uncle Errol and Gary goes undead.
Mallory is the link between each character and chapter, but the focus on her as the book's main character is a sleight of hand. Cousin Joe gets as much page time as Mallory herself. Still, when the perspective switches, there's a sense that their lives are ongoing off the pages. They're not hiding behind furniture like actors on a small set. In "You Didn't Ask for This," for example, a split screen orchestration occurs that cements this feeling of simultaneity. This effect is one payoff of Hopple's stylistic use of Krauth's rhizome of fragments.
I first came across Claire Hopple's work by stumbling across the flash fiction story "Now We're Getting Somewhere" in Okay Donkey magazine. The sentence "This cruelty-free deodorant has turned out to be anything but" appeared early on in the story. I could not move on past that sentence. I had to power down my laptop and go for a walk. Tell Me How You Really Feel is full of such sentences – glib, glittering, and sharp enough to make a stand-up comedian envious at Hopple's ability to write a one-liner.
Conceptually, a novella in flash fiction stories feels like a formal epiphany for possibilities of short form fiction. "Economy," a word often used to describe the precise compactness of poetry (perfectly ironic, considering that poetry barely pays whereas in the broader world, "economy" often refers to corporate production and consumption) comes to mind. Especially for its sardonic double meaning, "economy" is the perfect word for Hopple's telescoped prose in this often hilarious novella. The chapter titles themselves read like tracks on an album by a band who dropped out of therapy and are instead making irreverent, catchy beats:
Give Me Something I Can Use
Tell Me How You Really Feel
There's Nothing Wrong
I'm Glad You Asked
We're Way Past That
Neither Here nor There
Few and Far Between
You Didn't Ask for This
Stop Me if You've Heard This
The disconnection suggested in these titles drives the characters and their actions. "We're Way Past That" shows Mallory as the personification of isolation, talking to people from her past in her head. Her loneliness is a reminder that, for many, the emotional impact of quarantine began long before lockdown.
In "There's Nothing Wrong," Mallory's mom Bootsie faces a marital problem and reflects on the house she grew up in. "Her parents mostly ignored each other while she was growing up. Her mother still had wedding pictures hung all over the house but they were only bridal portraits. All different, but also strikingly similar poses, groom-less and teeming with a confidence bordering on smugness." This aching depiction of foresight and hindsight in a moment of stuckness creates a bubble that will need to be popped, either by snooping or direct confrontation. Bootsie chooses to snoop.
The feud between Uncle Errol and Gary makes an appearance in nearly every chapter. It is the most monumental event, but the fight only occurs on the periphery. In fact, the action is long over. Still, enemies remain. Not only do they live rent-free in each others' heads, their grudge seethes on the sidelines of every moment. Critical information is withheld. The rhizome of fragments at play turns the enigmatic grudge into an ongoing puzzle for readers. By the end, the puzzle implicates you entirely.