HAMPTON-JONES, Hollis

PERSONAL:

Married Stone Jack Jones (a musician, artist, and writer).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Nashville, TN. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Riverhead Books Publicity, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER:

Writer, model.

WRITINGS:

Vicious Spring (novel), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Hollis Hampton-Jones presents an eighteen-year-old lap-dancing, drug-hazed, born-again Christian as the protagonist of her first novel, 2003's Vicious Spring. Christy is a troubled youth who flees her staunchly religious Nashville family. But the life she discovers in the outside world is not what she was expecting, as she falls into drug addiction and the arms of a thirty-three-year-old boyfriend, Del, and takes up the easiest work she can find: lap dancing in a strip club. Christy is apathetic about her choices, noted a critic for Kirkus Reviews who commented that she "displays no interest in life and little ability to get one."

Christy's departure from her home is precipitated by the death of her younger sister, Lizzy, in a car accident. Thereafter, she can no longer tolerate her "Jesus-freak mother and leering pothead father," as the Kirkus Reviews contributor described her parents. She moves in with Del, a bouncer at a strip club, and is dubbed Sugar, working as a stripper and lap dancer and developing a cocaine addiction. As Christy's life spirals downward out of control, Hampton-Jones keeps her narration cool and distant. Several reviewers noted the author's narrative style, including Paul Griffith who wrote in Nashville Scene Online that "to her credit, the author attempts to maintain a moral and emotional distance from Christy." Yet according to the same critic, this approach leads to problems, for "Hampton-Jones makes no attempt to account for Christy's aloofness from the seediness around her." Thus, according to Griffith, what is missing from the book is "substance," and what the reader gets is mere "titillation."

Other reviewers voiced similar reservations. For Julia LoFaso, writing in Library Journal, "the novel feels overwritten" and is "ultimately disappointing." For Emily Simon, reviewing the novel in the Buffalo News, the story "feels totally faked, like an unusually bad episode of [the television drama] 'Crossing Jordan.'" Not all reviewers were so negative, however. A contributor to London's Observer Online called the book a "little bit American Beauty, a little bit Catcher in the Rye for crueler times." The same reviewer also felt that "Christy has enough innocence to make her tragic and make us care." And writing on PopMatters Online, Bunmi Adeoye dubbed Hampton-Jones' debut novel a "svelte, trendy book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY), May 4, 2003, Emily Simon, review of Vicious Spring, p. F4.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2003, review of Vicious Spring, p. 256.

Library Journal, May 15, 2003, Julia LoFaso, review of Vicious Spring, p. 124.

ONLINE

Austin Chronicle Online,http://www.austinchronicle.com/ (June 20, 2003), Jessica Garratt, review of Vicious Spring.

Fictitious Records,http://www.fictitiousrecords.com/ (March 27, 2004).

Nashville Scene Online,http://www.nashvillescene.com/ (May 1, 2003), Paul Griffith, "Sex and the City, Nashville Author's Debut Has Lots of Titillation, But Little Else."

Observer Online,http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (June 29, 2003), review of Vicious Spring.

PopMatters Online,http://www.popmatters.com/ (August 27, 2003), Bunmi Adeoye, review of Vicious Spring. *