an excerpt of

         A Holy Impropriety: The Stories of George Singleton

We believe in our marrow that tragedy means truth, that it points the way to our essence, enlightens with knives. Truth is instructive. Comedy, on the other hand, seems to some a respite from reality: life is not slapstick, not silly, and those who behave as though it is can be accused of terrific delusion or worse. We know (or at least feel) that Hamlet is more important than Much Ado About Nothing, and not simply because its taut dramatic structure moves more efficiently. Hamlet, in its dire sincerity (and despite the gravedigger), has lessons to impart, crucial wisdom that can assist an individual in his clash against the blunt force of the world.
        Tragedy has more apparent value than comedy for the same reason that anguish has more value than pleasure: anguish can lead to development, to evolution, because one grows only when one must change. Anguish nudges one onto the avenue of change because one must seek a remedy, one must shuck the pain—whereas pleasure, like happiness, inspires only the stasis of cerebral indolence. One quite naturally does not wish to alter a state of bliss, but here is the good and bad news: bliss is not native to our existence. The inspiration for some comedic drama and literature might be serious indeed (Lysistrata, for example), yet the actual comedy happens by manipulation, by the purposive twisting and bending of perspective, to elicit glee instead of glumness. The tragic worldview requires no such twisting since life itself is a tragedy—“something that should not have been,” in Schopenhauer’s characteristically dour calculation.
        George Singleton’s four story collections—These People Are Us (2001), The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2002), Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood (2004), and Drowning in Gruel (2006)—contain none of the hellfire trauma unleashed by vagrants far from God or the religious-mythical vision of male violence so central to the modern southern storytelling tradition established by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Both of these masters could be comical when they wished—As I Lay Dying, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”—but the predominant shade of their work is unrelenting darkness in a world abandoned by the holy. For all their genuine Christian sentiment, these two writers were tragedians of the Attic mold because, unlike Goethe in his Faust, they leave scant room for the redemption of their antiheroes. As long as redemption through Christ remains a possibility, a work cannot be considered legitimately tragic, or so runs the old argument via British critics I. A. Richards and George Steiner. Singleton’s fiction appears uncomplicated then, and straightforwardly comic, because his South is unstained by the bloodshed and sadistic mayhem rampant in so much work by Faulkner, O’Connor, and their descendants.
        What does Singleton’s South look like? In These People Are Us, the narrator of “How I Met My Second Wife,” Mel Dantzler, offers this description:

This is the country, in South Carolina. There is no garbage collector in my area. There’s also no newspaper delivery, and I’m convinced the mail lady doesn’t show up on Wednesdays because she readies herself for church. There’s no cable tv this far out. Sometimes I see pterodactyls flying overhead. I think my closest neighbor owns some slaves. Down the road is a house full of Arena Football League players, that’s how far from civilization I live.

Dantzler, wry and resigned, will get more or less lucky by story’s end, and indeed many of Singleton’s stories end semi-happily. “Cleft for Me,” about an itinerant furniture salesman who finds permanent romance in a parking lot, ends this way: “Bethany and I make love every night in one way or another. . . . We make our living. We find ways to make ways.” The husbands and boyfriends in These People Are Us are hapless, near-lovable jesters devoid of trendy existential dread; when they manage to succeed in securing the quietude of authentic love, that success almost always results from their earnestness, their peculiar kindness, and their recognition that they are indeed fools who could benefit from some alteration by female hands. . . .