Tenth of December: Stories

The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. The requisitioned the boots he’d spray painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chole. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the wood grain.

Today’s assignation: walk to the pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small by, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them looks. He knew that. And reveled in it. He would turn, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement.  (Tenth of December, pages 215-216)

George Saunders is an award winner author specializing in short fiction and I have never heard of him before his latest collection was chosen as the read of the month from one of my book groups. Award winning is an understatement – Saunders has won the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in the same year as well as placing as a finalist in a number of story competitions.  He is highly regarded by other authors including one of my favorite short story authors and The New York Times Magazine calls Tenth of December: Stories “the best book you will read this year.” This is why I like being part of a book group because I don’t know if or when I would have found this collection without it.

I did find the collection hard to get into. Saunders has a particular style that took some getting used to. He excels at writing from the thought process of a character so there is a stream of consciousness aspect to his work, however that was not the sticking point for me. Saunder’s stories have a disquieting atmosphere to them which, led to a slower reading experience than normal. I found myself rereading stories, or parts of stories and waiting a period before moving onto the next one. In one case, I waited three days between stories, as the one I had finished completely haunted my thoughts.

But at the end I was very glad to have read the collection. I think Saunders is a very intentional writer, a master at conveying the angst of life in America today from its commercialism, its corporatism, the moral quandaries people experience, the loss of identity, the need for connection, and the black humor that lurks at the corners of our experiences. I did not care for all of the stories. Al Roosten, the story of an angry, somewhat bumbling antique/junk dealer, did not resonate with me at all.  And I had to read Puppy (two mothers struggling to make the right choices) several times and I still didn’t know how I feel about it. One story, Sticks, is a two paragraph marvel but it didn’t seem to fit with the others. Most of the stories are about vectors meeting and converging – there is a very geometrical feel to them. Sticks is a recollection of the narrator’s father and the father’s relationship with the family by describing “a kind of crucifix he’d built out of a metal pole in the yard” through the years. Quite an accomplishment in two paragraphs.

Two stories deserve special mention. Escape from Spiderhead is the story that made me pause for three days. Set in the future, some human subjects are put through a series of experiments to test pharmaceutical drugs that allow them to feel certain emotions.  At the end, I did not know what impact the narrator’s choice would have so did that make it a wrong choice? What is the meaning of sacrifice? And how does the futility of an action play into a decision a person makes? The last story, Tenth of December, also features two characters who have to make choices: a young boy on a winter walk living in his imagination when he is suddenly faced with a real choice and a real danger, and a man with cancer walking in the same woods facing choices of his own. These two vectors meet and the story becomes an elegy of remembrance, love, wanting the best for someone. Where as Escape from Spiderhead represented the desolate side of Saunders, Tenth of December represented the hopeful side.

Saunders likes ambiguous endings (in Victory Lap, the reader is left unsure of what really happened) and moral quandaries. Saunders doesn’t want you to be entirely comfortable; he wants you to think. Many of his characters have to make the choice to break out of their confines (physical and psychological) in order to do the right thing or to act in any way at all. This is reality. Human beings have choices to make everyday – some of which may have a huge impact on someone else. How we make those choices, if we make those choices,  if they have a positive or negative consequence, and how those actions resonate with other people involved…this is all the fabric of life itself. As one member of my group said “There is a lot of Humanity” contained within these pages. And this is why I found some of these stories to be extraordinary.

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