MFA Greensboro Alum Lynne Barrett Reviewed by the Rumpus, 'Magpies'

One Hippopotamus and Magpies
      by Joseph Olshan
Lynne Barrett's story collection, Magpies, soaks in the muggy atmosphere of South Florida, with her well-told stories of swamplands and housing developments.

 

What is it about fiction set in Florida that is so tantalizing? Is it the third world sense of a tropical jungle teeming at the edge of a civilization whose perpetual summer and true multi-ethnicity seems to attract the disenfranchised, the burn-outs from the rest of the 49 states who are chasing warmth and oblivion? Is it the concentration of crime and political corruption? Whatever it might be, Florida seems to have attracted our best writers: Ernest Hemingway, Russell Banks, Carl Hiasaen, John Katzenbach and most recently Lynne Barrett, who has just published a fine collection of short fiction including one masterful near-novella-length work that packs more punch than many novels I’ve recently read.

Barrett’s is a South Florida of Moorish shopping malls, housing developments built up from swampland, nightclubs that attract a hard-core populace who subsist on glossy and gossipy magazines, and moldering Art Deco buildings inhabited by elderly, once glamorous women, who die alone and forgotten. Even in the most urban of Barrett’s stories, the landscape is “full of buzzes and croaks of unseen creatures.” One would think that generally warm weather would be less of an intrusion upon lifestyle. The climate, in fact, is a breeding ground for menacing hurricanes and epic electrical storms capable of wreaking havoc and destruction on an annual timetable.

“I picture us as the radar sweeps by, showing our cool blue shoulders and hot crotches, unmistakably new lovers,” thinks Jenny in the story “One Hippopotamus” as she lies in bed with Carlos. She is speaking of a thunderstorm whose volatility, the ability to cripple a power grid, creates the atmosphere for an important revelation Carlos makes that frames the budding relationship.

Read the full review here:  http://therumpus.net/2012/01/one-hippopotamus-and-magpies/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org