TUMBLE HOME: A Novella and Short Stories.<i> By Amy Hempel</i> .<i> Scribner: 155 pp., $21</i>

Amy Hempel careens around the lives of wealthy people like one of those little cameras they set loose on the moon. Her snapshots are barely recognizable snippets of conversation, architectural details and shrapnel from family disasters. The details assemble, however, into deeply moving, Gothic tales--from the woman in the graveyard where her dead baby is buried watched by the woman in the house across the street, to the novella “Tumble Home,” in which the woman in the fancy nuthouse puzzles over her mother’s suicide. Her characters are drawn as though they have been spied upon by the old lady across the street who peers out the parlor window, a corner of the dusty drapes lifted for a part of each day. “Writing to you,” says the narrator in “Tumble Home,” “I am myself. And what that self is I will tell you: a graveyard.” In fact, there is an alarming profusion of graveyards and houses-across-the-street in these stories, but there is also a lot of wit. “Tumble Home” contains a little bit of John Cheever, a little Ann Beattie and a lot of Jayne Anne Phillips, especially in the shorter stories. But don’t worry. Any terror you might experience is the terror of cocktail parties--the ominous flashes of doom are entirely shakable.