Wounded Boarders
George Singleton
Reviewed by Holden Schmale
A washed-up comedian turns to a hypnotist for help. Students try to persuade an adjunct instructor to let them into his full English 102 class. A shuffleboard playing club of hook-handed veterans are called to help a house flipper. As these might suggest, George Singleton’s short story collection Wounded Boarders is an unpredictable treasure trove of quirky characters and unusual situations.
Singleton’s stories are full to the brim with Southern charm and satirical humor, with dialogue that both characterizes a mix of realistic and cartoonish characters, and drives the plot of each piece forward. His stories are most often told in the first person, with Singleton’s preference being to feature Southerners completing some kind of manual labor, yet the stories each have their own unique heartbeat, take unpredictable twists and turns, and differentiate themselves from one another. Characters pop with personality, and some of the sharpest work is done in the small moments, when we are permitted access to the casual thoughts of our narrators.
The collection is especially interested in neighbors and communities, and what we owe to those we rub shoulders with. The rural Southern setting of many of the stories lends itself to a nuanced exploration of what community means in one place versus another, and the relationships that are forged in these unique places. We are treated to casual, conversational stories, such as “Gerald’s Last Girlfriend” and “Everyone Said Nothing,” where the bulk of page space occupies singular conversations and Singleton’s wit is put on full display, as well as heavier topic matter, such as “Groundwater” and “Home Ec,” where we follow a longer emotional arc along with our narrator, showing us another side of Singleton’s prose.
The stories range from the edge of flash fiction to more than forty pages in “I Know About Childproofing,” and Singleton, author of ten collections and two novels, displays an ability to thrive at any length the piece calls for.
In the titular story, “Wounded Boarders,” Singleton breaks from the collections preferred mode, first person, and tells the story of Celia Jenkins in the third person. The pulling back allows us a closer look at Mitchell Mitchell, hook-handed veteran and host of a shuffleboard group in his childhood home, next door to Celia’s fixer-upper. The story is a wonderful trip of absurdity and joy through an unlikely friendship that builds towards a heartwarming and fittingly strange conclusion when Celia must rely on the shuffle boarders’ help. Mitchell Mitchell is one of the collection’s most memorable characters, and the reader is endeared to him in real time, with Celia.
“Override,” the final story in the collection, perfectly captures many of the collection’s strengths – unpredictability, humor, witty discourse, sarcasm, and intellect. Emmett Grayson, adjunct professor of Southern Literature at College of the Foothills, is bombarded with emails from prospective students looking to get into his full English 102 class for the upcoming semester. We spend the entire piece in Emmett’s email inbox, seeing both incoming and outgoing mail between him and the students. Perhaps the collection’s greatest accomplishment, not only is Emmett fully fleshed out through only emails, so are several of the students, in only sparse exchanges. We learn about the characters through a mix of truth and gratuitous lies as the students try to talk their way into the class. At the same time, Emmett’s mental state is made clearer to us through his replies and reactions, and what information he chooses to accept and reject. These are but two examples of the wide range of stories within Wounded Boarders.
Throughout this book, it is clear we are reading the work of a veteran writer, one whose confident voice and polished prose make the unconnected stories feel like a complete work, in conversation with one another and with other contemporary grit lit fiction.
Not only will readers of Southern literature enjoy this collection, so too will lovers of sharp comedy, satire, and dialogue. This collection rolls off the page at a pace that is rarely seen from short stories and keeps the reader on its toes with great variance in length and situation. Wounded Boarders is a highly intentional work, and Singleton displays his prowess in every story.