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Southern Revivals
Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood
These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out .
It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backyard—fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE, BIRD ON A PERCH, FLY TOWARD HEAVEN, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice.
Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town, to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behind—just like those car-chasing dogs.
But bottom line, this funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human tale is really about how Mendal discovers that neither he nor the dogs actually want to catch a ride, that the hand that has fed them has a lot more to offer. On the way to watching that light dawn, we also get to watch the Dawes's precarious relationship with a place whose "gene pool [is] so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry."
To be consistently funny is a great gift. To be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift, put brilliantly into play in this new collection.
It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backyard—fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE, BIRD ON A PERCH, FLY TOWARD HEAVEN, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice.
Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town, to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behind—just like those car-chasing dogs.
But bottom line, this funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human tale is really about how Mendal discovers that neither he nor the dogs actually want to catch a ride, that the hand that has fed them has a lot more to offer. On the way to watching that light dawn, we also get to watch the Dawes's precarious relationship with a place whose "gene pool [is] so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry."
To be consistently funny is a great gift. To be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift, put brilliantly into play in this new collection.
300 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 2004
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184 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
September 21, 2019
Let me say here that I hated this book. Let me make sure that you understand that I really tried to give it a chance. Let me make it clear that I have never hate-read a book before, but that's the only way to describe my reason for stubbornly finishing this one.
In case you didn't get that, I disliked all the "let me say heres" and variations thereof, that the author peppered throughout the book, presumably as an attempt at sounding conversational.
I just didn't get this book. I picked it up because I like short stories. I got the impression — wrongly! — that maybe I wandered across a lesser-known Sedaris, based on the locale and the format. But even after I realized this wasn't the case, I still had hopes it would grow on me. Nope!
At first I didn't realize there was a sort of loose narrative throughout the book, and I started reading the shortest story in the book, "Unemployment." I kind of enjoyed it but it started stronger than it finished. After that I turned back to the beginning and just read them in the order they appear in the book.
Everything in this book — the characters, the situations, the settings — are either kind of nebulous or unbelievable. There doesn't seem to be much of a point to most of the stories, which would be fine if they were entertaining, but they're not. They just ramble. Or if they do manage to come to a specific, logical end point, Singleton tacks on some profound, head-scratching take at the very end, with his narrator, Mendal Daws, pontificating philosophically for a sentence or two about something or other that has little bearing on what we just read.
I also really didn't like the long run-on sentences and paragraphs where Mendal goes off on a tangent and gets completely distracted and off-track from what he was telling us about.
There's all these great, odd elements in this book — backwards Southern town, crazy upbringing with bizarre father who buries things in the backyard, etc. — and I think what a much better book this should have been. Oh well.
In case you didn't get that, I disliked all the "let me say heres" and variations thereof, that the author peppered throughout the book, presumably as an attempt at sounding conversational.
I just didn't get this book. I picked it up because I like short stories. I got the impression — wrongly! — that maybe I wandered across a lesser-known Sedaris, based on the locale and the format. But even after I realized this wasn't the case, I still had hopes it would grow on me. Nope!
At first I didn't realize there was a sort of loose narrative throughout the book, and I started reading the shortest story in the book, "Unemployment." I kind of enjoyed it but it started stronger than it finished. After that I turned back to the beginning and just read them in the order they appear in the book.
Everything in this book — the characters, the situations, the settings — are either kind of nebulous or unbelievable. There doesn't seem to be much of a point to most of the stories, which would be fine if they were entertaining, but they're not. They just ramble. Or if they do manage to come to a specific, logical end point, Singleton tacks on some profound, head-scratching take at the very end, with his narrator, Mendal Daws, pontificating philosophically for a sentence or two about something or other that has little bearing on what we just read.
I also really didn't like the long run-on sentences and paragraphs where Mendal goes off on a tangent and gets completely distracted and off-track from what he was telling us about.
There's all these great, odd elements in this book — backwards Southern town, crazy upbringing with bizarre father who buries things in the backyard, etc. — and I think what a much better book this should have been. Oh well.
January 3, 2016
Here’s the thing about Why Dogs Chase Cars… It’s a very clever book. Smart. Insightful. Singleton peels back the skin of the deep South and pokes at everything underneath. And he knows how to turn a phrase—I loved his word choices. Still, all these compliments do not necessary add up to an enjoyable read, and this may be one that offers more to chew over than to immediately enjoy. Part of the problem could be my fault—I read Why Dogs immediately after finishing Richard Russo’s very long Nobody’s Fool, and I could have used a little action in between (that’s what she said) to break up the introspection. But another explanation might be that this book is less fictional than the author would have us believe. It feels excruciatingly personal to me. Even if the characters and plot aren’t taken directly from Singleton’s childhood, it feels as though the conflicts and emotions are. He just seems so well acquainted with the disillusionment of youth growing up in these conditions, and reading the novel, I felt like I took on a little of that pain and melancholy. That’s a huge compliment to give an author, right? Not sure whether I enjoyed this read, though I definitely appreciated it’s many strengths. Anyone who grew up in the rural South or who wants to gain some insight on the current and near-recent culture should read this.
June 19, 2019
I have read and enjoyed many of Singleton's short stories, but for some reason these did not tickle my funny bone quite as much as some of the others. Still, there is much here to like. Oddly enough though, I had this nagging thought that perhaps this story could have been a much better novel than a collection. Also, the dialogue seemed just a tad off for some reason. I wonder if he ever gets any push back from some of our fellow South Carolinians? I did enjoy many of the little jabs he makes.
November 20, 2016
A good collection of interrelated boyhood stories. The first story is not a great launchboard but as you read on the characters grow on you and you appreciate the last story which kind of wraps it all up with a nice bow.
October 8, 2020
Well, this is an odd little book. I enjoyed the regional aspects of it, recognizing various towns and things. I really couldn't figure out if it were a true story or not, or had some truth in it. I need to see what others thought of this one!
January 3, 2023
I enjoyed the quirkiness and the ramblings of the narrator, unlike some of the reviewers here. It took a few chapters to get the flow of the story, but I'm glad I stuck with it. The small town quirks and the wiser than his years narrator made for a book I wished were longer.
February 16, 2024
this book made me nostalgic for something I never lived. It reminds me of stories from my mother and grandmother’s life; pulling off tar from telephone poles to chew on and napping in the car parked out on the grass, but with some extra philosophy and a deeper look into southern sentiments.
September 17, 2017
Very funny...
Read
August 30, 2021Great book to read
December 3, 2021
Absolutely love the book, an awesome book to begin with. A great book bought my copy from esentral website. Here's the link if you want to purchase it.
https://www.e-sentral.com/book/info/7...
https://www.e-sentral.com/book/info/7...
November 22, 2024
A mirror with memory.
January 7, 2009
A while back, I heard an interview with George Singleton on the radio, reading from his book The Halk-Mammals of Dixie. The clip was so funny, that I rushed out and bought the book (which is worth the purchase price for the title alone!)
When this book fell into my hands, I didn't realize at first it was the same author, until I read the blurb on the back cover. This book is a collection of stories, which flow together quite nicely, and evoke so clearly the quirkiness of some of our small southern towns. Maybe it takes a certain type of Southerner to appreciate this fully, but I think that 'most anyone could.
The stories all are told by Mendal Dawes, who is raised by his eccentric (some might say drunken or plain out loony-tunes) dad after his mother skipped town . Mendal's greatest desire is to escape from his hometown of Forty-Five SC. The stories take the reader through Mendal's childhood there, where his father buries stuff (ie fake Burma shave signs advertising a Baptist church, yard sticks in preparation for the conversion to the metric system, and other random objects) in their backyard, creates a fake toxic waste dump nearby to stymie future land developers, makes Mendal recite Marx and Durkheim, and dreams up scads of other oddball plots and schemes. Mendal is periodically aided and abetted by his friend Compton (also motherless, whose father is Mendal's dad's drinking buddy) and Shirley Ebo ('the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary'). One thing for sure...I'll never look at Chinese Handcuffs in the same way.
And why do dogs chase cars? "They can't form a noose without opposable thumbs. They don't know how to turn on the gas in the kitchen. It's impossible for them to slit their wrists. They don't have trigger fingers." But ultimately, maybe it's because, like Mendal, they just want to get out of town.
When this book fell into my hands, I didn't realize at first it was the same author, until I read the blurb on the back cover. This book is a collection of stories, which flow together quite nicely, and evoke so clearly the quirkiness of some of our small southern towns. Maybe it takes a certain type of Southerner to appreciate this fully, but I think that 'most anyone could.
The stories all are told by Mendal Dawes, who is raised by his eccentric (some might say drunken or plain out loony-tunes) dad after his mother skipped town . Mendal's greatest desire is to escape from his hometown of Forty-Five SC. The stories take the reader through Mendal's childhood there, where his father buries stuff (ie fake Burma shave signs advertising a Baptist church, yard sticks in preparation for the conversion to the metric system, and other random objects) in their backyard, creates a fake toxic waste dump nearby to stymie future land developers, makes Mendal recite Marx and Durkheim, and dreams up scads of other oddball plots and schemes. Mendal is periodically aided and abetted by his friend Compton (also motherless, whose father is Mendal's dad's drinking buddy) and Shirley Ebo ('the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary'). One thing for sure...I'll never look at Chinese Handcuffs in the same way.
And why do dogs chase cars? "They can't form a noose without opposable thumbs. They don't know how to turn on the gas in the kitchen. It's impossible for them to slit their wrists. They don't have trigger fingers." But ultimately, maybe it's because, like Mendal, they just want to get out of town.
August 5, 2012
This is a set of short stories as told by Mendal Dawes. Dawes is growing up in the tiny Southern town of Forty-Five, South Carolina. His father is just plum crazy. He buries things like signs saying they will become valuable. He disguises his yard as a toxic waste dump to discourage development.
Mendal wants out of town but first he gets to do some unpaid jobs like helping out at the nursing home and helping the only black girl in his class to read.
I am not a fan of short stories and these were just plain weird. Maybe this Northerner just doesn't get it.
Mendal wants out of town but first he gets to do some unpaid jobs like helping out at the nursing home and helping the only black girl in his class to read.
I am not a fan of short stories and these were just plain weird. Maybe this Northerner just doesn't get it.
May 10, 2008
A quirky, sometimes hilarious, collection of stories about the author's backwards and backwaters Southern upbringing. Unlike most story collections, these fit together like chronological glimpses into an unusual life.
July 26, 2012
One of the funniest fiction writers ever - in mankind, Twain, Cervantes, Singleton, and that's the truth - although I'm not sure I finished it on the 19th of September - that's just what I told the cops I was doing on that evening.
February 16, 2016
He's local. The characters and locations are only thinly disguised - and some not disguised at all. Forty-five, SC is the Greenwood area. We have a Ninety-Six hereabouts, just fifty-one excess. I'm a newcomer and I recognize the people and places.
Darkly humorous.
Darkly humorous.
did-not-finish
September 21, 2010Read the first 2 chapters (65 pages), but I'm not compelled to continue. Seems to lack focus for me since the author keeps jumping around.
June 23, 2009
Funny, but got kinda repetitive by the end.
August 18, 2012
It was ok. love the character development
November 15, 2012
funny stuff
May 11, 2013
Just could not get into this book. Read a few chapters and took it back to the library.
September 22, 2010
Read prior to G/R. DNF - quit reading early on due to lack of interest
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews