F*ckface

June 1, 2020
Hampton looks at modern life in post-industrial Appalachia in her sharp debut collection. In “Fuckface,” Pretty, a lesbian who is just shy of 21, lives in a trailer with her dad and works as a supermarket cashier in poverty-stricken Robbinsville, N.C., a town lacking in resources to address problems such as a dead bear in the market’s parking lot. Pretty, meanwhile, is afraid she’ll never be able to escape her town while her crush makes frequent trips to Asheville. In “Frogs,” twins Frank and Carolyn sign up for an ecology class led by a renowned naturalist. Carolyn’s fitful quest for self-improvement (she gives their brochure the “same frown she had given her smudged canvas in the painting class”) is botched after she feels slighted by the instructor. In “Mingo,” amateur photographer Tina struggles to convince her husband of the cost of strip mining on West Virginia’s natural habitat and to stop his accident-prone, elderly father from driving, while feeling her emotions and body enter a repeated phase of “hollowing out.” Hampton’s penetrating descriptions do a remarkable job of evoking a region where nature is dying off and tourism and mining boom and bust while the locals ponder their existence. These approachable, thought-provoking tales offer a range of insights on the characters’s complicated relationships to their environment.