{"id":379,"date":"2014-11-19T08:50:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T13:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nightowl.owu.edu\/?p=379"},"modified":"2014-11-19T08:51:54","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T13:51:54","slug":"between-wrecks-stories-by-george-singleton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/2014\/11\/19\/between-wrecks-stories-by-george-singleton\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of “Between Wrecks: Stories” by George Singleton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Justin Mundhenk<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

George Singleton\u2019s Between Wrecks<\/em>, released earlier this year by Dzanc Books, is a hilarious meditation on idling lives that are held together by reoccurring characters, the South, broken marriages, and plenty of booze.<\/p>\n

In \u201cNo Shade Ever,\u201d the first story in the collection, we\u2019re introduced to Stet Looper\u2014a reoccurring narrator and student in a low-residency Southern culture studies master\u2019s program\u2014who\u2019s \u201cbeen spraying gravel directly or metaphorically since birth . . . like [he] took off out of one trouble spot only to arrive at another.\u201d Stet is led to a junkyard by the kind of dream \u201ca person could[n\u2019t] forget or disobey.\u201d He gets drunk with Doc, the owner, abandons his dream, and in a moment of clairvoyance, knows he will \u201cmake some more promises . . . [he] would never keep, and from which [he\u2019d] never be able to escape.\u201d The characters of Between Wrecks<\/em> mirror Stet\u2019s predicament: they\u2019re idling, awaiting the next event that will produce more turmoil in their lives. They may be in limbo but they\u2019re quite certain that whatever happens next won\u2019t be good.<\/p>\n

Saint Arthur Weddle, or Start, narrator of \u201cOperation\u201d and \u201cThe Sinkholes of Duvall County,\u201d has a similar penchant for prescience: \u201cI looked way into the future and thought about how we would measure our lives between such wrecks, and that there would never be a time when we could feel safe or content about the next one looming.\u201d Scratch-off lottery winner Mal Mardis of \u201cTraditional Development\u201d knows that \u201cwinning money\u201d isn\u2019t \u201cnecessarily good fortune, at least not for people like him.\u201d Over and over again Singleton returns to mishap; no matter how some play their cards, they just can\u2019t seem to get a break.<\/p>\n

Between Wrecks<\/em> is fourteen stories and two hundred seventy-one pages of well educated, southern men stuck between one bad spot and the next. These aren\u2019t your usual sadsack, despair-wallowing men, though. They tell their stories and often react to them with cold, objective, indifference. We could call them stories or ethnographic sketches similar to Stet\u2019s various failed thesis projects. Singleton, like Stet, wants to show us that the South isn\u2019t as fucked up as it\u2019s made out to be. It\u2019s full of hard-luck lives just like everywhere else; some people just resign themselves to the fact that life is nothing more than an uncontrollable chain of reactions.<\/p>\n

Despite all of the weightiness, Between Wrecks<\/em> is a funny, often hilarious, book. Singleton knows how to employ humor without devolving into caricature, which, like all good satire, allows us to contemplate the reality of an unjust world. The humor comes to a raucous conclusion in the final story\/novella \u201cI Would Be Remiss\u201d: the eighty-pages of acknowledgements that round out Stet Looper\u2019s soon-to-be published biography No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee<\/em>. The format challenges notions of story but a story is<\/em> told as Stet thanks all the folks who helped him along the way\u2014some of them famous, many of them dead, others unknown. The story of how Stet comes to write his biography unfurls like a Rube Goldberg machine, where something as innocuous as staring at a long-snapper\u2019s ass\u2014Stet was briefly a punter in college\u2014can lead someone down the path of biographer.<\/p>\n

Between Wrecks<\/em> will no doubt make you laugh out loud, but it\u2019s not all fun and games. Singleton seriously asks us to question the notion of luck and to take a closer look at how we arrive at certain moments in our lives. Do we really have control, and if not, what can we really do about it?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Review of Between Wrecks: Stories<\/em> by George Singleton<\/p>\n

Published by Open Road Integrated Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Justin Mundhenk   George Singleton\u2019s Between Wrecks, released earlier this year by Dzanc Books, is a hilarious meditation on idling lives that are held together by reoccurring characters, the South, broken marriages, and plenty of booze. In \u201cNo Shade Ever,\u201d the first story in the collection, we\u2019re introduced to Stet Looper\u2014a reoccurring narrator and student […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":540,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written-by"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}