George Singleton’s fiction debut, titled “Novel,” features a hero named Novel, two Irish cousins named James and Joyce and a baker named Maura-Lee who is famous for her Jesus Crust. You have to hand it to South Carolina’s reigning poet laureate of the bizarre: He doesn’t pussyfoot around with subtlety. There are no long, loving descriptions of the Southern landscape in this book, nor does Singleton digress on the so-called “New South.” He’d rather club us on the funny bone.
This style of humor has been Singleton’s métier for three volumes of short stories, and “Novel” is his attempt to stretch it to the longer form. Happily, unless you’re the kind of reader who likes your fiction tucked in and neatly pressed, Singleton makes the jump just fine and then some. “Novel” reads like a long middle-of-the-night drunken tale that gets so weird and wild it’s halfway into the next day that you wonder: Did that really happen?
Once you open “Novel” you’re in Singleton’s world – Gruel, S.C., to be precise. It’s a tiny town: a bakery, one hotel (which Novel owns) and a pool hall where two paint-speckled drunks spend their days calling ridiculous shots.
A former snake handler by day and secret speechwriter for local government by night, Novel is not your typical B&B owner. He winds up possessing the Gruel Inn soon after his mother- and brother-in-law die in a freak accident involving cigarettes and an oxygen tank. With part of the hefty legal settlement she wins, Novel’s wife, Bekah (or Kah, as he calls her), buys the inn and turns it into the “Sneeze ‘n’ Tone,” a weight-
loss center that harnesses the caloric expenditure of sneezing. Then, after Bekah leaves him, Novel reopens it as a writer’s retreat.
Although the title suggests a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the writing life, “Novel” is not an ordinary roman a clef. First, Singleton never makes the mistake of assuming that his protagonist is interesting by default. As soon as Novel opens his colony, the book shifts its focus to the people around him.
Singleton also refuses to indulge the annoying fallacy of writing a novel about writing while keeping his own authorial anxiety hidden. Just as Novel struggles with how to turn the inn’s guests into character studies, Singleton wonders every now and then if a reader will lose interest in his invention. Then he stops himself: “I don’t care that it sounds unrealistic. … Not everything moves at a 20-year-old crankcase oil’s pace in the South.”
Eventually, when the writing retreat business runs aground, Novel blockades himself in an empty room, stocks up on hooch and starts in on an autobiography, which he titles “Novel.” The deeper he gets into this project, the more he drinks, and the more he drinks, the more he begins to discover that he is at the center of a gigantic secret that encapsulates all of Gruel. Eventually, Novel gets hired as the town historian to investigate. If “Novel” reveals any of Singleton’s growing pains as a writer, it’s here. The book’s lengthy and convoluted middle section becomes a bit indulgent. He’s so funny it’s tempting to go easy on him, but this is a short-story writer who once said, dismissively, “For me, novels tend to ramble on slowly.”
And this one does for a bit, but it’s hardly a cardinal sin when the writer has given us so much to chuckle about. Singleton is such a genius at the one-liner that I laughed aloud five times before page 50. “I’m serious as a cup of lye, man,” cries Novel’s brother-in-law in one scene. Another describes Barry and Larry, the two reprobate pool players, walking into a room dragging their “cue sticks behind them like petrified prehensile tails.”
In a way, “Novel” has something in common with these two dinosaurs. It swaggers into a room full of artificially countrified Southern fiction, oozing the fumy stink of what its author read growing up. There are whiffs of Faulkner here, Joseph Heller and Barry Hannah, too. Most of all, though, what makes this lark of a novel worth reading is the fact that it can exist within this tradition and carve out its own weird corner of the universe. Gruel, S.C., might be small, and it might be run by a bunch of crazies, but there’s no place I’d rather hole up and write my own first novel.
John Freeman lives in
New York.
Novel
By George Singleton
Harcourt, 333 pages, $24
