“Elliott Spencer”
by George Saunders
from the August 19, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
The last time George Saunders published a story in The New Yorker was early 2016, about a year before Lincoln in the Bardo hit shelves. Those who have been reading this blog for a while know that I have a very hit-and-miss relationship with Saunders. I was very excited for Lincoln in the Bardo, for example, but I didn’t like it the first or second time I read it. For me over the past decade there have been more misses than hits, though I’m glad others are getting so much from his work. It doesn’t seem to matter how many misses there are, though: I’m still always excited to read whatever he puts out there. I cannot imagine my interest is simply residual heat from his earlier collections. I still harbor hope that the heart of his story will shine more clearly than the quirks of language and structure. There is no doubt about it: Saunders is a master stylist with a superb and unique voice. It’s just that, for me, it seems he’s doing the same thing he was doing years ago.
Let’s see how we get along with “Elliott Spencer.”
Right away I’m both drawn in and wary. In the first few lines I’m already in a world that I’m familiar with: it’s George Saunders’ world:
Today is to be Parts of the Parts of my
Sure, Jer Please do Point at parts of me while saying the name of it off our list of Words Worth Knowing.
Agespot
Finger
Wrist
At wrist Jer says, This one’s been broken, seems like.
Then pokes.
Ouch? he says.
Yes, I say.
Groin
Waist
You were no spring chicken, says Jerry.
I do not understand what you just said, please explain, I say.
You were not young, Jerry says. Your body is not the body of a young person.
Oh, that’s cool, I say. That’s cool, Jer.
Jer shakes his head his certain way Meaning: 89, you crack my ass up.
Long ago, perhaps one week, we had Explain Time, due to figure of speech crack my ass up All asses are precracked, turns out, even mine, which Jer helped me learn by taking of phonephoto.
Capitalized terms of art, broken sentences, an ignorant (at first) but earnest subject of some science fiction project. This is George Saunders all over the place already. It feels quite a bit like “Escape from Spiderhead,” which Saunders published in The New Yorker in 2010.
And yet it isn’t. While Saunders is exceptional at this, we can go back and find similar work at least as far as Daniel Keyes’ 1958 story “Flowers for Algernon,” which was eventually expanded into the famous 1966 novel of the same name.
This makes me wonder about something. I don’t mind it when writers revisit themes, and certainly writers have styles that become familiar. Why does it grate a bit more when it’s Saunders? I think it has something to do with the style, which can come off as gimmicky. Perhaps it stands out more, means less?
Or perhaps it’s that this particular style has already come to signify a particular story with particular themes and, importantly, particular pathos. I’m not sure the variations offer much more nuance.
That said, as I mentioned above, I’m also intrigued. Why is there someone learning about his body, an old body at that? I’m going to find out, and maybe I’ll find my hope paying off.
Please feel free to comment below. Share your thoughts on “Elliott Spencer” and Saunders’ work in general.
I didn’t read the story yet, but your commentary did nudge me into commenting for the first time on the site (long-time reader, blah blah) because it reminded me just how – to borrow your very accurate word – grating his stories have become. I simply cannot get as excited about Saunders as I used to be able to. Perhaps there was G.S. oversaturation a couple years ago, perhaps it was the gimmicky Lincoln in the Bardo audiobook with all the usual back-patting celebrities, but the seeds were planted that Saunders’ work simply so often leaves me cold (as I first realized upon reading The Semplica-Girl Diaries in the magazine), as does most capital-I “important” fiction, no matter how well disguised.
J.L. — thanks for commenting! I hope you’ll feel compelled to again!
Now, some of my initial thoughts on this story . . .
Oh dear, I did not like this much at all. All of the usual things that give me pause — that I mentioned a bit in the top post — are here. But, worse, Saunders doesn’t even seem to trust the story will be sufficiently clear and, instead, gives us paragraphs like this:
That paragraph comes after we already know what’s going on. I’ve felt that Saunders subtlety has been slipping for a while, but here it’s as if he’s not trying. Now, the paragraph above was stated by a reporter who was deliberately trying to provoke a blunder, but I think even there it could have been done differently.
The story did get more interesting at the end when Greg/Elliott started to wonder about his identity, but, again, this has been done before and in similar stories. Here it felt like the obligatory “make this concept deeper, add resonance”; Greg’s struggles didn’t feel inherent to the story.
Last thing for now: one of the things that grated in Lincoln in the Bardo grated here again:
In Lincoln I could never understand why the characters talked over each other or added meaningless codas to each other’s sentences, in a long trail of choppy dialogue. Here we get it again. I see no point other than to make it weird and choppy. It feels the wrong kind of odd.
So . . . did you like the story?
i should add here, a day later, that if you did like the story I really do want to hear from you, and not because I’m looking for an argument. These threads are always better if we have folks who enjoyed the story, and you are most welcome!
I always look for David’s feedback, and I miss his comments on this story. Hope he’d come out of his busyness and write something about this story.
Diaspora, thanks for that. I decided not to comment because I didn’t really like the story and the author interview annoyed me. I also checked to see what other Saunders I have read and was shocked to find it might only be one story (“The Semplica-Girl Diaries”) which I read twice a few years apart and didn’t enjoy either time. I was sure I had read more of his work but it seems not. Weird.
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There was nothing deep or profound about the story. He had a premise, tried to work it out (or, in his own mind, let the story write itself) and didn’t get anywhere new or interesting. The idea of loss of identity and its partial recovery is old news in fiction. He adds nothing to that idea. The man-being-used-for-an-experiment-who-escapes-in-the-end made me thing of Ben Marcus’s “The Glow-Light Blues” (published in The New Yorker in 2015, discussed here, and which I also didn’t like). The odd sentence structure and composition made me think of Charles Yu’s “Subtext®: It Knows What You’re Thinking Stop Thinking” (which you can read here, which I did like a lot, and which on further inspection is probably less similar to Saunder’s writing than my memory thought it was.)
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Sometimes I feel like a bit too much of a curmudgeon when there are several things published close together that I don’t like, especially when it is something written by a pretty widely admired author like Saunders. It makes me sometimes think it’s a good one to skip comment on. After seeing Trevor’s comment I was not sure I had anything to add so I just left it at that. If more people had commented I might have replied, but this one seems to be sliding away without much fanfare. That’s ok by me because it’s Monday again already, which means on to the next one!!!
I agree, Diaspora!
At the same time, I’d appreciate your thoughts as well, should you be so inclined — most welcome!
Thanks Trevor, for your encouragement. And thanks to David for taking time and writing his thoughts on this story. And also for that link to Yu’s subtext.
I was also equally disappointed with the story. From the interview, I find that Saunders had a great plan to execute, but I somehow feel that it could not be done effectively in the end.
On the other hand, his interview was very interesting. His words on reading experience, future shape of politics, social media presence were interesting, if read in isolation. At some point he says, “… the story communicates its deeper intentions to the writer through thousands of line-level choices.” Obviously, he seemed to have been more preoccupied with the writing process, and the reader might have been the second priority for him in that process.
Trevor, this won’t be the positive review you were asking for, but I do want to give credit (props, i believe it’s now called) to Saunders for a couple of things: for one, he is a political satirist, if less subtle in this story than in the brilliant “Adams” of some years back, at last not so heavy-handed as many of the New Yorker’s cartoon and Shouts and Murmurs staff have been in the recent era. And in that he is sometimes genuinely funny as in the repeated names given to the brainwashed souls here. But most of all, I see him writing in the tradition of Thurber and Barthelme in this magazine, stretching the limits of imagination and language, as he did in Bardo. Even there he did not resort to the tropes of the zombified undead, but gave the departed (you should pardon the expression) life and originality.
Brilliant piece, loved it. Loved the language play. Captivating reading, couldn’t stop. Saunders nailed the dialogue. Thought at first this was an AI sci-fi piece, but it became something far better.