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Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. George Saunders’s “Tenth of December” was originally published in the October 31, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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I have been having a hard time with George Saunders lately. Where I once looked forward to his stories in The New Yorker, and have recommended his earlier story collections to others, I was a bit saddened when I saw his name in this week’s issue. I just haven’t enjoyed him this year. But I dug in — or, rather, I tried to. I started this story on Monday morning and felt like I was making steady progress, but it took me three days to actually finish it. I’m afraid I’ve just continued to drift away from one of my favorite short story writers, and I’m not sure it’s his fault because, in retrospect, this is a pretty nicely executed story, even if I found it a bit predictable and Saunders’ style and structure familiar as to him (not as to others, since I still think Saunders has his own strangeness).
“Tenth of December” has a structure that reminded me right away of one of my favorite Saunders stories of the last few years, “Victory Lap” (my brief thoughts here). In that story, Saunders had us enter the heads of two narrators with distinct (thoroughly stylized) voices. At first the two lines of narrative are distinct and seemingly unrelated, but soon the two characters come together in an unexpected and dramatic way. Similarly structured and similarly stylized, “Tenth of December” didn’t work for me nearly as well while reading it. When I wrote about Saunders’ last story, “Home” (my thoughts here), I wondered how much of my disappointment was based on the fact that it wasn’t a good story and how much was based on the fact that, if you’ve read enough Saunders, the stories start to feel the same. Sadly, that this story feels similar to another, despite the differenct characters and the different circumstances, only strengthens arguments against Saunders we’ve heard before: that he’s mostly style and little substance.
When the story begins, we meet a young boy named Robin, who has ”unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs.” Obviously picked on at school, in the wilds around his home he visualizes a world where he moves around enacting heroic stealth operations against some otherwordly creatures named the Nethers. Robin runs all of the speaking parts in his own mind, becoming as much a figment of his own imagination as the Nethers. Here we get a sense of his voice, which moves along haltingly, mimicing the way a child (or an adult) might add on new phrases as they come to mind, moving the inner narrative forward bit-by-bit, each time teasing out a bit of minor peril and heroism which can never climax because then what?
Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small but, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them loops. He knew that. And revelled it. He would run, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement?
Each time I read a Saunders story, even back when I was really enjoying them, I had a hard time trying to determine if the voice was effective or affected. And even when I found it effective, it still often grated for a while until the story completely took over. While this voice worked for me in theory, I still found it kind of annoying as I read because it continued to push me out of the story, but this perhaps represents my own late-blooming prejudice more than anything. This is not the shortest of short stories, and I’m sad to say I never was able to fully engage with it due to the voice play.
Interestingly, despite the stylized voice, the story is still told by a third-person narrator, albeit an incredibly close third-person narrator, so close, in fact, that even spelling and usage errors pop in. This works well since both Robin and the character I’ve yet to talk about have withdrawn from their lives and created an alternate narrative where they see themselves from some imagined perspective that stands apart. Here we see Robin again confronting the Nethers, who increasingly take on the characteristics of the jerks at school.
He’d just abide there, infuriating them with his snow angels. Sometimes, believing it their coup de grâce, not realizing he’d heard this since time in memorial from certain in-school cretins, they’d go, Wow, we didn’t even know Robin could be a boy’s name. And chortle their Nether laughs.
Part of Robin’s inner narrative involves the new girl at school named Suzanne. She doesn’t even know his real name, but now the Nethers have her and Robin is there to save her — their relationship is destined to last forever. It’s total wish-fulfillment (and familiar — come on — we’ve all at least imagined a good come-back to that argument long after we lost) as she says, “And also, yes to there being something to us,” and invites him to her pool. I was a bit thrown when she said, “It’s cool if you swim with your shirt on.” This seemed to be Saunders butting in his head to show that Robin is also chubby and dreaming of a girl who doesn’t mind. But I’m not so sure it’s consistent with Robin’s inner narrative to let in his chubbiness, especially in the form of swimming with a shirt. A minor quibble.
At the end of the first section, Robin spies a winter coat and, a bit farther on, the man who has dropped it despite the winter chill. This is Don Eber, a man in his fifties who, we find out as the story breaks Robin’s section and takes us to Don’s, has cancer. Shedding his winter coat and testing the theory that freezing to death is just like falling to sleep, Don is struggling with his own inner narrative where Dad and Kip each hold conversations about Don’s actions. Don’s third-person narrator is also so close as to allow all of the slip-ups in Don’s mind as coldness overtakes him:
Not so once the suffering begat. Began. God damn it. More and more his words. Askew. More and more his words were not what he would hoped.
Hope.
Don, attempting suicide, and Robin, coming to the rescue with a coat (but across a barely frozen pond) are about to meet in dramatic fashion. And I’ll be darned if in writing this review I didn’t find myself appreciating Saunders’ story more than when I read it, though not to the point I’m interested in going back through the story now. It’s long and (perhaps it was my mood) a bit tedious.
So I find myself needing to test myself re: Saunders. If I now read the older work I enjoyed, would I still like it? I hope so, and I hope I can get over whatever hang up I have right now because, going through the process of writing this review, I’m beginning to suspect it’s just me. Is it?
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. George Saunders’ s “Home” was originally published in The New Yorker‘s June 13 & 20, 2011, issue.
Click for a larger image.
The summer fiction issue is here. Unlike last year’s, which kicked off the “20 Under 40″ with an eight-story issue, here we have only three but from three relatively well-known writers: George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Lauren Groff (though she’s lesser known to say the least). This issue also features a bunch of short non-fictional snippets (of widely varying quality) from Aleksandar Hemon, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahira, Téa Obreht, Edward P. Jones, Vladimir Nabokov, and Salvatore Scibona.
I was pretty excited by the fiction itself because I like each author. Now, having read one, I hope things get much better with the other two.
Something is up. Normally I am a fan of George Saunders, but the last few things of his I’ve read have really disappointed me. Worse, they’ve really annoyed me. I’ve always understood why Saunders’ work — what with its quirky, blatantly off-the-wall style, its familiar and by-now conventional criticisms of contemporary society – would annoy some, and now I find myself in that company. I found “Home” trite and, relative to Saunders himself, fully clichéd. If you’ve read much Saunders, what was once unique here feels formulaic, and the “human story” doesn’t pull it through.
Not that this retroactively makes me dislike his earlier work, much of which I still find fresh and exciting. But where he fails is when the story comes off as merely that style and un-nuanced, conventional critiques of contemporary society: corporations, pharmaceuticals, war. It failed, for me, here.
The story begins when Mikey returns home, somewhat covertly:
Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window.
“Get in here, you,” Ma said.
Inside were piles of newspapers on the stove and piles of magazines on the stairs and a big wad of hangers sticking out of the broken oven. All of that was usual. New was: a water stain the shape of a cat head on the wall abovce the fridge and the old orange rug rolled up halfway.
“Still ain’t no beeping cleaning lady,” Ma said.
I looked at her funny.
“Beeping?” I said.
“Beep you,” she said. “They been on my case at work.”
Thus the strange setting and a strange verbal joke that will play out through the entire story. Ma has always had a foul mouth but now she “was working at a church now, so.” Another strength I usually find in Saunders is his humor — not here. It’s not that any of this is typical relative to most other short story writers, but it is more and more typical to Saunders, which is where his uniqueness is turning stale.
At home, Mikey finds that his mother’s former partner has moved out and a stranger named Harris has moved in. The Becket-like dialogue where “father” and “son” meet is indeed absurd but, to me, not amusing or clever and leads nowhere, not even to a point about leading nowhere.
We find out through this, though, that Mikey has returned from the war; the officials in the story give lip service: “Thank you for your service.” After some time with his mom, he heads over to see Renee, his ex-wife. She is remarried and doing well, certainly much better than his mother is doing. They had children together, so Renee and his mother are still in touch, which is important a bit later in the story because Ma is also about to become evicted from her home of 18 years.
One thing Saunders is good at is adding a human element to the absurd world he’s created. He might be criticizing contemporary society in the most obvious ways, but something more human rings out underneath. However, in “Home” it felt like we got to the Insert-Human-Element portion of the story. When Mikey gets back to Ma’s, she’s basically out on the street and has to find a place to live. A temporary solution is to go to Renee’s. And in this transition, we get a moment where the ragged, dialogue driven narrative is interrupted by some stream-of-consciousness as the narrator ruminates on the conflicting emotions as proud people go from bitterness to vulnerability.
Although yes and no. That was just one of my feelings.
Another was, You crazy old broad, you narced me out last night. What was up with that?Another was, Mom, Mommy, let me kneel at your feet and tell you what me and Smelton and Ricky G did at Al-Raz, and then you can stroke my hair and tell me anybody would’ve done the exact same thing.
As we crossed the Roll Creek Bridge I could see that ma was feeling, Just let that Renee deny me, I will hand that little beep her beeping beep on a platter.
But then, bango, by the time we got to the far side and the air had gone from river-cool to regular again, her face had changed to, Oh, God, if Renee denies me in front of Ryan’s parents and they once again find me trash, I will die, I will simply die.
I’m interested in everyone else’s thoughts here. Did this story, which seems to insert a shallow sample of various ills without counter-balancing with an in-depth look at human emotion, work for anyone?
The last piece of fiction The New Yorker published in 2010 was a great short story by George Saunders, “Escape from Spiderhead” (click here for my thoughts on the story). In his interview that accompanied the short story, Saunders said he originally planned on that story being a novel. Honestly, I’m glad it didn’t go there. And now that I’ve read his novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), I’m glad that he generally produces short stories and didn’t force “Escape from Spiderhead” to be any longer than it is.
As implied in that last sentence, I’m not a big fan of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil — for reasons I’ll go into later – but I did enjoy reading it. Of course Saunders made me laugh, as always. It has its clever moments. So let’s start with the good things.
The world Saunders created is bizarre and fun to get to know, and Saunders introduces some aspects of it in the first lines:
It’s one thing to be a small country, but the country of Inner Horner was so small only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six Inner Hornerites had to wait their turns to live in their own country while standing very timidly in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.
Whenever the Outer Hornerites looked at the hangdog Inner Hornerites crammed into the Short-Term Residency Zone, they felt a little sick, and also very patriotic.
You read correctly. Inner Horner, one of the three countries in this novel, has seven citizens, and it’s barely big enough to fit one. And as weird as this is, it kind of feels real. I can see the Inner Hornerites standing “very timidly” just outside of their country. I can see the mix of sickness and patriotism the Outer Hornerites feel when they glance at their less fortunate neighbors. It gets wierder. Both the Inner Hornerites and the Outer Hornerites are beings made out of both organic and mechanical elements. Phil, for example, is some kind of machine that carries his exposed brain around on a tray. It sometimes slips off, causing his voice to become more stentorian.
Besides Inner Horner and Outer Horner, we also have Greater Keller, a country that is just a small strip of land (big enough that the Greater Kellerites can only walk in a single-file line in a large circle) that surrounds Outer Horner. The Greater Kellerites are always concerned about their happiness quotient, and it suddenly dawns on them that they might increase their happiness (which is currently at about an eight out of ten) by inviting the President of Outer Horner for a visit. Dale, who is in love with the daughter of Greater Keller’s President, gratefully accepts the assignment to go find the President of Outer Horner and invite him for tea. He travels in a “series of wide arcs” because since birth he’s spent his days walking in a big circle. However, what he finds when he gets to Outer Horner causes him to speed back to Greater Keller, “his shock and disgust at all he had seen causing him to inscribe what was, for him, a remarkably linear path.”
We readers have been privy to the horrors Dale has just witnessed. Not long after introducing us to Outer and Inner Horner, Saunders also introduces us to Phil. Toward the beginning of the book, Inner Horner inexplicably shrinks. Suddenly it is big enough to fit only a part of one of its citizens. Phil wanders on the scene and insights a furor at the sudden invasion. These Inner Hornerites just think that Outer Horner is supposed to take care of all of their problems.
“I’ll tell you something else about which I’ve been lately thinking!” he bellowed in a suddenly stentorian voice. “I’ve been thinking about our beautiful country! Who gave it to us? I’ve been thinking about how God the Almighty gave us this beautiful sprawling land as a reward for how wonderful we are. We’re big, we’re energetic, we’re generous, which is reflected in all our myths, which are so very populated with large high-energy folks who gave away all they have! If we have a National Virtue, it is that we are generous, if we have a National Defect, it is that we are too generous! Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a small crappy land? I think not! God Almighty gave them that small crappy land for reasons of His own. It is not my place to start cross-examining God Almighty, asking why He gave them such a small crappy land, my place is to simply enjoy and protect he big bountiful land God Almighty gave us!”
This introduces the book’s weaknesses. While I loved the setting and Saunders’ writing style, I was less impressed by the satire. Sure, it is funny and, at times, spot on; but it was all a bit too obvious and, frankly, easy. The errant nationalism Phil incites and the mindless way the other Outer Horners act is a bit tiresome when drawn out over the length of a novella. Plus, one of my favorite things about Saunders’ short fiction is that, though it might have aspects of politics and satire, the main aspects are usually much more subtle and inner. In this case, any sensitivity we might have to the characters is covered up by the polemics.
I can’t say they aren’t set up nicely, though. For example, when Phil becomes President of Outer Horner, he wants his citizens to sign a Certificate of Total Approval. When one asks what is being approved, that citizen is immediately criticized for being untrusting. Consequently, the other citizens say they don’t even need to read what they are signing. The end result is ridiculous, funny, and spot on in its criticism and its cumulative humor:
So Larry and Melvin and the Special Friends and all the Advisors lined up facing backwards, eyes closed, and signed the Certificate of Total Approval.
It’s not a bad read. There are several laugh-out-loud funny parts, which are remarkably rare in the fiction I read, but those are the main highlights. All in all I was disappointed in this book.
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