Book Review

George Singleton’s newest short story collection, Wounded Boarders, takes the mundane and presses on all its tender spots. Its setting is thoroughly Southern—geographically, most of the pieces take place in small towns south of the Mason-Dixon line—but the characters are exceedingly relatable in the ways they occupy our uber modern world that always seems one notch away from catastrophe.

Sometimes the catastrophe hovers fuzzily in the background, the narrative equivalent of quirky wallpaper: lacking clear agency in the present moment, but always there in the scene reminding us of its presence, like the titular story that follows an attractive youngish woman who flips houses and meets a neighborly veteran whose hand is a hook. At first, the veteran’s own intentions are unclear, but when the unwanted attention of a persistent junkyard worker takes a turn towards the creepy, it’s the veteran and his team of shuffleboard-playing fellow vets that come to the rescue.

In other stories, the catastrophe is at the forefront, unabashed and hilarious. When a comedian’s life falls apart in “The” because his prefrontal lobes appear surprisingly unformed for a middle-aged guy with a wife and a—up to this point—profitable career, he turns to a hypnotist to achieve what therapy cannot. It works even as he remains in the dark about the methodology behind his sudden transformation, but in life as in fiction, sometimes the cure is worse than the disorder.

Still other pieces take a turn towards the absurd, challenging its own believability in the name of humor even as the characters themselves remain firmly grounded in the ordinary minutiae of life. In “You’ve Told Me This Joke Before,” a former welcome mat salesman finds himself in the rare luck of receiving a seemingly limitless supply of unexplained Amazon deliveries whose cumulative retail value is so astronomical it borders upon comedic. A light investigation later, he finds out that an elderly gentlemen who used to live at his address—and now suffering from dementia at a nearby home—is the one behind it, but efforts to rectify this disastrous habit fails to produce anything but a recycled joke. In “Everyone Said Nothing,” a bored newlywed couple in a deserted town keeps their marriage and their sanity alive and well by getting robbers to try to rob their house. The premise is outrageous, sure, but the feelings nevertheless ring true, at least to anybody who has ever found themselves with another person in a small town with nothing to do (except “cruising back and forth from Wal-Mart to the Sonic”), a person they theoretically love but are about to not be able to stand if things don’t get interesting, stat.

In “Bobbleheads,” the absurdity lies not so much in the events or plot but in the inner psychological workings of the protagonist. In a hallmark example of this, a recently-fired yearbook photographer goes back to the scene of his last job (and cause of his unemployment) in order to graffiti the school grounds with messaging designed to humiliate the kids who snitched on him. Many a revenge story has been penned by writers past and present but this is arguably the most petty one, and the scale of such pettiness is a delight to behold.

Singleton shows himself to be a sort of literary Rembrandt, playing with shadow and light in subtle and unforgettable angles, delighting in all the ways something ordinary becomes spectacular. The piece that starts off the collection, “Horace Poor, Horace Mint,” holds off the sobriety until the very end, and when it finally does, it’s was such a subtle, psychological one that reading the climax felt almost like watching a slight of hand. A son and his lawyer father spend their weekends going through piles of currency in search of rare coins. It’s clear from the beginning that this weekly activity is a veridical search for profit on the part of the elder and an act of obedience (or maybe love) on the part of the younger man. The son takes on a manual labor job working on houses, and his father advises him that such sites are a potential gold mine for what they’re collecting. One day, just as the older man predicted, the son finds a coffee can filled with rare coins, so rare that he wonders if his dad planted it just to prove his point. But when he comes home and shows his progenitor his find, the reaction borders upon heartbreak: “. . . more than anything his face offered a look of divine helplessness—like he realized he’d wasted every Friday night, and sometimes Saturdays, in search of a worthy penny, dime, or quarter . . .”

In scenes like this, Singleton manages to pass on insights about his characters (and by extension, the human condition) through these seemingly ordinary moments where nothing and everything is happening at once. Over the course of the collection, the stories themselves evolve as he plays with length and style: Two of the longer ones, “I Cannot Escape Diogenes” and “I Know About Childproofing,” feel almost like novellas in both their stretch and the ways they follow the metamorphoses of their characters as they navigate the catastrophic and quotidian moments that define a life. The final piece of the collection, “Override,” disrupts with its entirely-email format, but manages to be one of my favorites despite my previous aversion to epistolary: Never have I laughed so hard and had my heart so heartbroken over a series of messages delivered over the ether.

Over the landscape of these seventeen stories, Singleton’s protagonists repeatedly disappoint, fail, get fired, mislead, misunderstand and act purposely in ways that get themselves misunderstood, and yet they still manage to turn otherwise dull things of life—dead-end jobs, overzealous neighbors, ghost towns, prolonged home renovations, parental hobbies—into moments of surprise and redemption.