Pasture Art

January 19, 2015
This fine assembly of seven short stories and one novella from Barton (The Dry Well) is set in his native state of Alabama. The well-plotted novella, “Playing War,” has vivid characters including Carrie Fuller, a dental assistant in her 40s, who clashes with her brusque husband, Foster. A lifelong deer hunter, he heads a gang of fellow enthusiasts, including his employee Dale Tilghman. He confides in Carrie’s father, an arthritic retiree, how the hunting accident that killed his older brother, Bruce, came while the bored hunters played “a game of war.” Adding to the tension, Bruce was Carrie’s lover while she and Foster dated. After her father repeats the tale to her, Carrie suspects Foster murdered Bruce in retaliation. Carrie’s investigation revs up the domestic strife, but the author smartly keeps things restrained, thereby making the tension stronger. The fresh and original title story concerns teenager Leah attending summer school while caring for her alcoholic mother. To her credit, Leah stays hopeful that she can graduate and escape her emotional prison. In “Watching Kaylie,” the young Kaylie doesn’t fare as well in kicking her heroin addiction. The bait-shop proprietor, Aaron, who loves her, wants to play her savior. During a surprisingly candid moment, she reveals he’s a “better man” than his brother Charles, her dope supplier. This standout short story with its gut-punch ending anchors Barton’s captivating third fiction collection, which is reminiscent of Larry Brown’s gritty Southern storytelling.

January 15, 2015
Literate, deftly constructed stories of backwoods Alabama.It wouldn't be Southern fiction without a nod to Faulkner, and Barton gets a hint in early: He sets a hayrick on fire, synecdoche for a barn, and lets the smoke linger in the swampy air. Then there's the land, always a central character in southerly writing: pastures, dark soil, brooding forest, river-the Tennahpush, in this case, as real and as not-real as Yoknapatawpha County. But Barton's quiet homage and adherence to convention are just that; he's an original. The opening story finds a folk artist on the point of giving it all up even as the young woman who helps out around the place looks hard at a dreary future. "You haven't made anything new in a good while, Mr. Hutchins," she says, yearning for something different from insulin shots, pill bottles and shot glasses. The art that she likes, she declares, involves things that will take a person away from all this; in a nice bit of symmetry, the closing words of the collection also point to the desire to leave a place that holds people fast. Barton's best moments join human generations to that land in different times: Here a slave, hauntingly speaking of plantation violence, suddenly sees the possibility of an escape seemingly not available to most mortals, and there a modern countryman grapples not just with "crackheads and meth freaks" and other denizens of the bottomlands, but also the possibility of flying saucers. Barton is not a funny writer as such, but there is some sly humor at play, too, as when that flying saucer fellow allows that his daughter might just be a lesbian. "Lois says I make it sound like Margaret's a monster when I say that. Like I might as well go around telling people that she turned into a werewolf, when I'm really the one who turned into a monster, according to Lois." Barton is generous and sympathetic toward his characters, no matter how much of a handful they are. A pleasing collection, humane and well-written.

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