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  • Dirty Fighter
  • William Householder (bio)
Staff Picks
George Singleton
LSU Press
www.lsupress.org/books/detail/staff-picks/
208 Pages; Print, $22.50

Here are a few things you may not know about George Singleton, Southern fiction writer, purveyor of "grit lit," and one of the funniest short story writers this benighted country has produced: George and his opossum buddy have time-traveling adventures as the superheroes Manna Man and Thanatosis Girl, righting wrongs throughout history. George likes to put his good friend, the acclaimed novelist and poet Ron Rash, into his stories in a most unseemly and grotesquely funny fashion. (It's not hard. "Rash" lends itself to abuse in so many ways). George likes flea markets. Fact or fiction? You decide.

George Singleton is not just a funny Southern fiction writer in the grand tradition, which includes Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Donald Barthelme and Roy Blount, Jr. But he is also a first-class travel agent. How's that, you ask? I thought he worked for Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina? Rest assured, he still does, but his passion has always been travel. If you've ever read any of George's stories, you know he likes to send you to the most interesting places this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Have you ever visited a town called Gruel? Or Poke? Or Forty-Five? Sure, there are towns with such odd names all over the South, and yes, the populations of such towns exist, but not in the same state! The Carolinas of George Singleton are familiar, but slightly skewed.The big problem with reading Singleton is after a while you start to talk and think like one his characters or worse yet, if you're a writer, you start to write like Singleton and nobody else can do that but him. For example, take a look at the opening of "Rinse Cycle":

Tyler Fort would still be alive these thirty-plus years later had my father not thrown away the cheap Zebco rod and reel, if my best friend Arlie Capps's father hadn't beaten him after we got caught, if Mr. Fort had learned how to read and been able to get another job after the mill closed, if new owner, Mr. Patel, had drained the swimming pool after Labor Day behind the twelve-room Hilltop Motel like old owner, Mr. Liner, always did ... if Raj Patel had installed a higher fence or security cameras to let him know when two fourteen-year-old boys jumped a split rail in order to harass a boy pummeled by an unhinged father, if the town of Poke could still afford a single cop to work third shift driving around with a spotlight, and—to be honest—if Tyler Fort possessed the ability to say, "I don't want to wear dresses every Sunday night." But he's long dead.

That story's opening paragraph has so much energy in its prose and momentum in the exposition it supplies, only to slam on the brakes in the last sentence: you have to read it twice just to be sure of what's happened. I read that opening and said, "Damn!" Further evidence that the writing of George Singleton will make you forget a good Baptist upbringing.

The men in the fourteen stories comprising Staff Picks are middle-class, middle-aged, white guys from small Southern towns. They are hapless. They are suckers. They are schmucks trying to get by. The women are long-suffering or no-longer [End Page 32] suffering as they've wised up and left these pathetic men. Some good examples of these men are in "One More," "Gloryland," and "Resisting Separation."

George Singleton is also a dirty fighter. You think you're getting a funny story about a couple's marital foibles and then out of nowhere he'll punch you in the gut with enough force that the air coming out of you sounds like a sob, then he'll throw dust into your eyes to make you tear up. His coup de grâce is his signature wrestling move, illegal in thirty of the continental United States...

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