George Saunders has been getting some pretty serious (or at least
seriously public) cred for his latest short story collection, Tenth of
December. For the past few weeks he’s sat comfortably in the top
five of the NYTimes bestseller list. A few weeks ago he read on
Studio 360. You may even have seen him bumbling through an
interview/berating on the Colbert Report. This attention may seem
surprising for a semi-Avant Guard and generally subversive author writing in a
genre (short stories) that is typically thought of as a little
niche.
But the stories in Saunders’
book seem built for the spotlight. This may be because of how emphatically
of-the-moment they all are. Saunders is one of several writers today
interested in writing that reflects the quirks and usually abasements of
current American English. His paragraphs are peppered with “likes,” “ha-ha’s,”
and the clumsy but familiar syntax of the information age.
I say information age
expecting and probably deserving some eye rolls, but I think it’s a good way to
contextualize Saunders’ unique style. Take the opening lines from
“Exhortation:” “I would not like to characterize this as a plea, although it
may start to sound like one (!). The fact is, we have a job to do, we have
tacitly agreed to do it (did you cash your last paycheck, I know you did, ha ha
ha).” Observe the layers of linguistic influence – the parenthetical
exclamation point typical of text messages, the passive aggressive, Ted Talkish
“we have a job to do, we have tacitly agreed to do it,” and the spelled out
laughter that appears in pretty much every form of electronic
communication. The result is an embedded self-commentary running along
side the actual content of the sentences. For every statement made, there
is an undercurrent of insecurity. This story is a faux-memo sent to
unmotivated employees (two classic Saunders moves, by the way, the faux-form
and the workplace), so a certain degree of colloquialism can be expected in the
voice, but even in his third person stories, Saunders uses this same tone of
painful self-awareness – self-awareness that you might could attribute to the
dramatic increase in self-awareness and just awareness in general brought on by
constant connection to web-culture.
This prose style
(especially familiar, probably, to David Foster Wallace fans) makes Saunders
characters both exhausting and fragile, which fits these stories of men and
women struggling to make sense of the flux around them. Portraying this
flux, I think, is what Saunders does best. Each story takes place in
familiar environments but always with one irreconcilable detail that seems to
set the story in the not too distant future. In “The Semplica Girl
Diaries” a father keeps a journal of his struggle to find a way to live up to
his daughter’s birthday expectations that are quite extravagant thanks to the
influence of her affluent peers. But instead of hiring an expensive
clown, he has to rent a group of human decorations called Semplica Girls to
hang in his yard. In “Home” a soldier returns to his broken family after
fighting in a foreign war and is bewildered by the MiiVOXMAX, which appears to
be some miniature data-storage device. And in all the stories, the
characters' stream of conscious oscillate between actuality and cinematic fantasies
that often lead them to disappoint act of failed-heroism (see "My
Chirvalric Fiasco").
These details emphasize
what might be Saunders’ main focus: the anxiety of time. His characters
are constantly struggling to locate themselves in the narrative of history, but
find the task daunting. Are their worries and struggles at all comparable
to the worries and struggles of their parents? Or their parents’ parents?
Will anything they teach their kids matter by the time they grow up? And, perhaps
the question at the center of it all, is there anything at all constant about
the human experience? The answers to these questions seem especially elusive
these days with constant and frightening change. Saunders is not
presumptuous enough to offer answers, but Tenth of December gives
a chance to recognize in the voice and environment of the modern world
something that is inspiring and commonly human, at least for now.
