198
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
In his latest book, Staff Picks, George Singleton follows closely the model that has worked so successfully in his previous collections, combining in a single volume a group of previously published stories loosely linked by characters, settings, and themes. Yet in more fundamental ways, it is strikingly new, reaffirming Singleton’s reputation as one of the most talented fiction writers of our time: a humorist with a tragic sensibility, a Southerner whose stories transcend the boundaries of a particular place and time, and a consummate craftsman, well versed in all aspects of the narrative art. Singleton’s comedic virtuosity is on display in story after story, beginning with the lead story, “Staff Picks,” which is also the title of the collection as a whole and the subject of an inside joke that Singleton shared with fellow fiction writer Frank Reardon in a recent Bull Magazine interview: “The title story just came around with that woman named Staffordshire, named after a dinner plate, and then how she had to keep her hand on an RV, and I thought – because I ain’t got anything else to do in South Carolina but think up scams – hey, maybe if I call a collection Staff Picks, unsuspecting bookstore browsers will see the title and say, ‘It must be good! The staff picked it,’ et cetera.”1 Staff Picks is in fact good enough – and funny enough – to make the book a legitimate “staff pick” in any bookstore. In the thirteen stories that follow the title story, we meet many other quirky characters with incongruous
STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE IN UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATIONS a review by James W. Kirkland George Singleton. Staff Picks: Stories. Louisiana State University Press, 2019.
JAMES W. KIRKLAND has taught in the East Carolina University Department of English for over fifty years. His reviews and articles on subjects ranging from Melville’s literary uses of tall tale tradition to composition pedagogy and magico-religious healing traditions have appeared in English Language Notes, Medium Aevum, Western Folklore, North Carolina Folklore Journal, Tar River Poetry, and other journals. He has co-authored or co-edited seven books, including Writing with Confidence: A Modern College Rhetoric (Heath, 1989), Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (Duke University Press, 1992), and Concise English Handbook, 4th ed. (Houghton, 1997). GEORGE SINGLETON has published stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, Zoetrope, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, Ontario Review, and New England Review, and they have been anthologized in nine editions of New Stories from the South. His short story collections include These People Are Us (River City Press. 2001), The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), Why Dogs Chase Cars (Algonquin Books, 2004), Drowning in Gruel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006). He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro.
1
Frank Reardon, “George Singleton,” Bull 8 Apr. 2019: web.
names and equally strange physical features and personality traits. Renfro Truluck, the narrator of “Columbus Day,” spends most of his mornings doing laps around the Steepleburg mall (known to locals as “the track” because it attracts more walkers than shoppers) and his afternoons and evenings worrying that his wife Lissett’s obsession with “Killer” TV shows about “fratricide, matricide, filicide, sororicide, and . . . mariticide” (20–21) means she’s planning to murder him by feeding him a poisoned pastry from her Pure Tarts bakery. Preston Hewitt, the narrator of “Hex Keys,” tells the story of a 1972 Father’s Day excursion with his dad, Buck, who introduces him to a series of comically named ex-girlfriends including Arlene and Varlene – two waitresses at the Mama’s Nook café (which Buck jokingly refers to as “Mama’s Nookie”) – and Rayelle, who lives in a trailer park just down the road with her husband Floyd, a man so mean he “got kicked off the football team for beating up a trumpet player in the pep band he thought blew offtune” and “could headbutt a Coke machine into spitting out bottles” (41). Odum Tobe, the narrator of “Trombones, Not Magic,” concludes that he was “named for a dead rooster” his father was attempting to kill when he accidentally chopped off his ring finger, an incident that becomes the focus of a family joke about why he waited so long
OPPOSITE George Singleton with Richard Moriarty, former Greensboro Review fiction editor, at UNC Greensboro, 12 Mar. 2019