If the challenge of a novelist is to engage and retain the reader's interest over the many words of the novel, then the challenge of the writer of short fiction must be to make us feel something for characters who live on the pages for only moments but who, hopefully, will live on in our minds for some time thereafter.  In Surviving Nashville, Stacy Barton is able to meet this challenge in sixteen short-shorts of life in the South, giving us authentic if dark glimpses into the landscapes of lives scarred by tragedy.

Barton's setting is the South of NASCAR, trailer-living, gossiping do-gooders, sweet tea, funeral food, legalistic religion, oppressive heat, and lemonade, where girls have names like Lida, Sammie, Lizzie, Kitty, or Opal and men are known by initials like JD and JP, where Catholics are oddities or (worse yet) are going to hell, where a veneer of gentility covers over dark family secrets.  Topically, her stories are almost uniformly in a minor key, opening windows into lives shadowed by sexual abuse, sickness and death, the indignities of old age, authoritarian religion, intractable sadness, murder, death, incest, suicide, eating disorders, miscarriage, and depression.  From the opening story, "Periwinkles," --- a remembrance by Elaine of her her younger sister's suicide after her rape --- to the closing story from which the collection title is taken --- about a outwardly happy mother struggling with severe depression and thoughts of suicide --- the sense you have is that Barton looks at life and sees nothing but survivors haunted by tragedy. 

There is little if anything to smile about here, and when faith enters in it is of the Christ-haunted and not Christ-hallowed kind (with the possible exception of "The Summer of My Tenth Birthday," a story of faith restored).  Where a novelist like Clyde Edgerton might see delicious humor and irony, Barton sees little but sadness and dysfunctionality.  In the end, taken as a whole, the stories do not offer a fully true picture of life in the South, as one would hope to find moments of lightness and joy amidst the tragedy.  But that's probably too much to expect from one collection of short stories.

But all this is to quibble with choice of topic, and I would read these stories simply for the beauty of the words.  In her writing, Barton has the economy of a poet, using spare but resonant words,  Her dialog is wondrously authentic and would sound real to anyone who has lived in the South.  As most of the stories are written in the first-person, they come across as authentic and deeply personal.  One suspects that Barton is not unfamiliar with the dark places of which she writes.  It is, simply, good writing.

If you love good writing and have a tolerance for the darkly tragic, I recommend Surviving Nashville.  Only balance it with a deeply funny novel like Edgerton's Rainey, please.  Life isn't just about surviving but about living.