The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs by George Singleton
I had a rather common, but still interesting, experience recently: I was reading George Singleton’s new collection of stories, The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs, and reached the end of one of the nobody-but-George-could-have-written-it tales. I set the book aside with a smile and, as is my habit, reached for another of the books that were sharing my reading time—in this case a novel, written in an earnest and straightforward style. As I opened it, my eye fell upon a random sentence—which I consumed in a single pulse—not mentally sounding out the words, I mean, but just ingesting it whole—yet processing it in the same mindset with which I had been reading George’s story. For a fraction of a second, the novel became an entirely different book.
Honestly I don’t remember the sentence, and it doesn’t matter—it could have been any sentence—but it came across as loaded with a wry subtext, shimmering in an absurd comic spirit the novel absolutely did not have—and it created one of those amusingly discordant sensations common to faulty register shifts.
The experience reminded me of Leslie Nielsen, years ago on some talk show, demonstrating the difference between delivering a serious line and a funny line—and of course they were exactly the same. This, I’ve decided, is the key to understanding George’s stories: they are all tragedies, delivered comically.
Most of his stories are narrated in first person, and in the couple in this collection that aren’t, the narrator sticks closely to the protagonist—more often than not, a kid—sometimes a kid who’s become a middle-aged man, who earns our sympathy by trying to find something normal and sane to hold onto in a world of South Carolina dysfunction. We’re dealing with poverty, self-destructive habits, life on the margins, unemployment, untrustworthy parents, broken families—and it’s funny. Turn these stories a few degrees to the left and they’re grit lit. I can’t claim to have a serious understanding of comedy, but intuitively I know if there’s anything divine in our sordid existence, it’s laughter. Life has made its terms very clear—no one can escape those terms, we can only choose to cry or laugh. George’s stories are in the second camp.
These stories, which have no truck with conventional plots and arcs and that sort of thing, work so well because we sense something redeemable in the protagonists—who are all derived from the spirit of George Singleton. A great part of the joy of reading George’s stories is that they seem to say: as crazy as everything is, it’s okay. That and the fact that he knows his territory and the people in it so well, and his inventiveness seems inexhaustible.
“I’m not sure how I turned on the windshield wipers, but they came on and drug across the glass like a stutterer trying to say Birmingham.”
“‘Hello Doug’. The way she said my name, it came out like a past tense verb.”
“He owned calluses you could strike a safety match on.”
“He died of blood cancer, of course.”
(Take that last one out and put it in my serious novel and it would be the register shift I described earlier, in reverse.)
He could make a story out of the UPS man dropping off a package. He reminds you of just how much there is to see in a spoonful of soil.
Sometimes I think of it like this: if an alien came here to try and understand what human beings are like, in all their nuance and complexity, (and if one ever does I hope George is there)—George’s stories are about everything you could never explain. I mean, you could actually observe human beings for a long time, and note everything they do and say, and not have a clue what it felt like to carry around what you carry around when you are one.
Sort of like not knowing how “It’s a big building with patients” is funny.
September 23, 2023