Book Review: Ambrotypes

The Australian National Maritime Museum

Ambrotypes by Amy Cipolla Barnes, word west press, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

If inimitableness on the page is a sign of genius, then Amy Barnes is some kind of genius. To review her collection of stories, Ambrotypes, properly, I would need to get a stack of children’s construction paper, cut it to stars and shards using oversized antique scissors, soak it all with the spittle of a dying garden hose, then catapult the resulting mess through the sky, streaking near the space-line, to splatter high-rise windows in New York City. Then maybe I could say something about literary talent and artistic arrival. Then maybe I could get at the ghastly weirdness at the heart of this book. For this is a book of strange dreams seeping and cawing from the disturbed well of American domestic life. I’m talking about bathtubs on airplanes, suburban stigmata, gaping holes in houses. The nearly 60 flash stories in this collection are absurd. They’re also deadly serious.

I’m not sure what other writers compare to Barnes, so I’ll just tell you what came to mind. At first, I thought of the magical-realist Americana of Steven Millhauser. Barnes’ stories pop with a Brand Name symbolism, artifacts of consumer life given warped new dimension, sometimes characters themselves. Then I thought of the postmodern eeriness of Don DeLillo as evident in the namesake “Ambrotypes.” “I watch a documentary that tries to authenticate a newly discovered death photograph of Abraham Lincoln,” says the protagonist. “I stare at his face and freeze frame to see if he’s stepped in a black hole, if the tiny polka dots that make him up in the 19th century are coming back to life on television.”

Lastly, I thought of the speculative feminist fiction of Carmen Maria Machado. Like Machado, Barnes’ stories mix whimsy with horror. In “Mannequin,” a woman falls to pieces, literally, when her abusive ex shows up. In “The Inosculation of Sarah,” which appeared in trampset, the titular inosculation becomes a metaphoric way a mother protects her daughter from a man described as a “tornado in another county.”

Perhaps no author is quite like Barnes, at least that I’ve read. I found myself slowing down for each story, tracing the firework-spread of associations and images. Barnes creates unique textual tension between hard-wrought detail and effusive symbolism: a composition half-severe with its own conceit yet half-loose with wordplay. I noticed Barnes’ first sentences typically cut deep and set the stakes for something odd and severe. “Mama gave me stigmata for my seventh birthday” is how “Cul-de-Sac Saint” begins. It’s one of my favorite stories for images like “fireflies replacing bees around my bloody hand held aloft.” How Barnes grows each kernel of her expansive imagination, well, that’s the uncanniness of this book. Ambrotypes disturbs and dazzles.