The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Half-Mammals of Dixie, by George Singleton
reviewed by Aaron Gwyn

George Singleton. The Half-Mammals of Dixie. Algonquin, 2002. 287 pages. $22.95.

In his second collection, George Singleton proves that southern humorists can definitely strike more than one note. Like his northern counterpart, George Saunders, Singleton manages both to write stories that make us laugh and to construct characters and situations that gesture toward the deeper and often disturbing undercurrents of existence. Singleton seems to realize that comedy can have an even greater resonance if there is the potential for misfortune, even tragedy. In the lead story, “Show-and-Tell,” a young boy spins an amusing yarn even as we catch glimpses of his father’s loneliness and longing through the narrator’s third-grade consciousness. A similar strategy is employed in the collection’s funniest piece, the wonderfully titled “This Itches, Y’all,” a story about the decline of a young man’s social standing after he plays the lead role in a head-lice documentary. But such humor takes place against the backdrop of social change, as the “entire nation transform[s] itself” at the end of the 1960s. Singleton’s brilliance lies in the contrast of the specific and the general, and what seems to result is the kind of universality that Tolstoy famously argued for. At the same time, there is a Swiftian quality to the work, a kind of social satire working to correct the folly of our age. In the final story, “Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award,” the NASCAR driver scrolls through the litany of objects that helped him accomplish his feat, among them LaserJet Laser Paper, Ball Roller Grip pens, the Intel Pentium III, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Singleton’s humor is biting, and yet we feel we are in the hands of a writer who forces us to laugh in the face of circumstances that, without the lens of a careful and precise art, would evoke only tears.