The Tenth of December by George Saunders book review

‘Tenth of December,’ by George Saunders

By GREGORY COWLES

“Writing short stories is very hard work.” That, at any rate, is what George Saunders had to say on the subject some years ago, in an essay about the postmodern master Donald Barthelme, and lest anyone raise a skeptical eyebrow — since by then Saunders had already proved himself to be one of the most gifted, wickedly entertaining story writers around — he continued to wring his hands, revealingly, a few pages later: “The land of the short story,” he fretted, “is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.”

Illustration by Domitille Collardey

I love how this makes Saunders sound like a nervous explorer, crossing thin ice to reach a distant smoldering volcano. The land of the short story! But it also captures something fundamental about his own brutal, jokey stories, which for all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot. In “Tenth of December,” his fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran’s post-­traumatic impulse to burn down his mother’s house — all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are.

And “Tenth of December” is very dark indeed, particularly in its consideration of class and power. It’s been seven years since Saunders’s last collection, “In Persuasion Nation,” and in the interim America has settled into a state of uncertain financial gloom that seeps into these stories like smoke beneath a door. Money worries have always figured in Saunders’s work, but in “Tenth of December” they cast longer shadows; they have deepened into a pervasive, somber mood that weights the book with a new and welcome gravity. Class anxiety is everywhere here. In “Puppy,” a woman whose marriage has lifted her from dysfunctional roots is so horrified by a poor family’s squalor that she finds empathy impossible, with tragic results. In “Home,” a soldier returning from the Middle East drops in unannounced on his ex-wife and her much richer new husband: “Three cars for two grown-ups, I thought. What a country.” In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” a father broods that he can’t provide his children with the same luxuries their classmates have: “Lord, give us more. Give us enough.” Elsewhere he confides to his journal that he does “not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.” (What identifies this as a George Saunders story, and not, say, a Raymond Carver one, is its deadpan science fiction gloss: the luxuries in question are third-world women strung up as bourgeois lawn ornaments.)

Yet despite the dirty surrealism and cleareyed despair, “Tenth of December” never succumbs to depression. That’s partly because of Saunders’s relentless humor; detractors may wonder if they made a wrong turn and ended up in the land of the joke after all. But more substantially it’s because of his exhilarating attention to language and his beatific generosity of spirit. “Every human is born of man and woman,” one narrator reflects, in what sounds suspiciously like an artist’s statement. “Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father. Thus every human is worthy of love. As I watched Heather suffer, a great tenderness suffused my body, a tenderness hard to distinguish from a sort of vast existential nausea; to wit, why are such beautiful beloved vessels made slaves to so much pain?”

This “vast existential nausea” is Saunders in a nutshell. Yet he subverts and mocks his own humanist idealism both by presenting it as the product of a drugged mind — the narrator here is a prisoner, medicated against his will to become more eloquent — and by having a lab assistant gently deflate it a few paragraphs later: “That’s all just pretty much basic human feeling right there.” 

Fans of Saunders’s three earlier collections, beginning with “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” in 1996, will immediately recognize the gonzo ventriloquism that gives his work such comic energy. By tapping into the running interior monologues of his hopeful, fragile characters, Saunders creates a signature voice that’s simultaneously baroque and demotic — a trick he pulls off by recognizing just how florid our ordinary thoughts can be, how grandiose and delusional and self-­serving: “Did she consider herself special?” a teenage girl asks in “Victory Lap.” “Oh, gosh, she didn’t know. In the history of the world, many had been more special than her. Helen Keller had been awesome; Mother Teresa was amazing.” This is Alison Pope, age 14, who speaks to herself in beginner’s French and entertains innocent fairy tale fantasies of meeting a boy she thinks of, generically, as “special one.” Instead, she’s abducted by a would-be rapist with romantic delusions of his own: “In Bible days a king might ride through a field and go: That one. And she would be brought unto him. . . . Was she, that first night, digging it? Probably not. Was she shaking like a leaf? Didn’t matter.”

If a damsel-in-distress narrative seems a creaky vehicle for Saunders’s spirited wordplay and high moral inquiry, well, it’s true there’s nothing especially sophisticated about his story lines; up close, his volcanoes turn out to be fizzing with baking soda and vinegar. And his brand of straightforward dramatic irony — we see the delusions the characters don’t — tends to put the reader (and the author) in an uncomfortably superior position; at his worst Saunders can come off as a little smug or complacent, like somebody with a bumper sticker reading “Mean People Stink.” But beneath the caricatures his best stories are animated by true fellow feeling and an anthropologist’s cool eye for the quirks of human behavior: a boy in an Indian headdress, racing down a school hallway; a wife’s fond memory of “that laugh/snort thing” her husband does in her hair; the patriotic piety that leads everybody the veteran meets to thank him for his service. Saunders hears America singing, and he knows it’s ridiculous, and he loves it all.

The title story, which closes the volume, is in many respects a companion piece to “Victory Lap,” which opens it. Another dreamy adolescent is lost in fantasy until physical danger intrudes, this time in the form of actual thin ice. The story ends on a hopeful note, as so many of the stories here do — this book, with its cover divided neatly into black and white like a semaphore yin-yang symbol, is at least as interested in human kindness as it is in cruelty. It’s no accident, I think, that Saunders has chosen to set the story on this particular day, or to name the collection as a whole after it. Why the 10th of December? It’s not the solstice yet; the days are drawing shorter, but things aren’t as dark as they could be; even now, there’s still a glimmer of light.