These People Are Us: Short Stories

A bouncer videotapes an episode of Bonanza over his wife's sonogram and scrambles to find a replacement, an ex-poet takes a job driving a van that provides mammograms, and an office-supply salesman falls for a woman from an all-girl wrestling revue in a town called Kingdom Come in George Singleton's These People Are Us. While the collection as a whole suffers from a uniformity of tone (all the baffled, overeducated narrators are basically the same guy) and theme (the scratch-yer-head differences between the sexes plus a dose of late 20th-century cultural malaise), taken individually these are fine stories odd, amusing and insightful. (River City ( Mar.)