Book Review: Tenth of December by George Saunders
Tenth of December, written by George Saunders and published by Random House in 2013, is a collection of short stories, each originally published separately between 1995 and 2011. No narrative or shared characters connect these stories but all share the same brutal emotional honesty and unique use of language that makes a Saunders short story what it is.
I have never been a fan of short stories and this opinion was instilled in me by my mother. “By the time you get into one, it’s already over” she would say, so in an effort to evolve as a reader, I sought out a copy of this book. Tenth of December is comprised of ten short stories, some lasting barely a few pages and others lasting for several chapters. The double edged short sword of short stories is that while an author can explore a multitude of characters and scenarios in a few hundred words, there is always a chance that you won’t connect with a vast majority of the works.
The book starts off strong with “Victory Lap”, where a young girl is kidnapped from her home and her neighbor has to decide whether to intervene at the cost of breaking his strictly enforced household rules. “Victory Lap” is a prime example of Saunders stylistic M.O.. Alison, the young kidnappee, opens by narrating her life at home, as if she were a princess at a formal gala.When the narrative switches to Kyle, her neighbor, we hear his inner dialogue with his overprotective parents, their praise and condemnation for his actions and their reasoning for their numerous and explicit household rules and work orders. “New geode on deck. Place in yard per included drawing. No goofing. Rake areas first, put down plastic as I have shown you. Then lay in white rock. THIS GEODE EXPENSIVE. Pls take seriously. No reason this should not be done by time I get home. This = five (5) Work Points”. All while his neighbor is dragged further from her house and closer to the back of a van.
Things continue on a high note with “Sticks”, a two page story about a father’s increasingly erratic behavior of decorating a pole in his front yard. What stars as a playful family tradition soon spirals into a display of grief following the death of his wife. These two stories exemplify the Saunders’ writing style. Short satirical works that use behavioral extremes to showcase emotional extremes.
Other stories venture further into science-fiction and speculative futures. In “Escape from Spiderhead”, a prisoner is subjected to numerous drug trials that can immediately alter a person’s behavior and emotions, creating love or maddening depressive episodes at the touch of a button. In “My Chivalric Fiasco”, a janitor at a medieval theme park witnesses the rape of a fellow employee and is given a promotion to keep quiet. Unfortunately, in his new role as a court guard, he is required to take KnightLyfe, a drug that makes you think, act and talk like a real chivalric knight and in a moment of gallantry, he exposes the rapist and is then fired.
These stories both succeed in satirizing the appendages of capitalism with the same deep confrontational attitude, but not all the stories in Tenth of December work quite as well. While I can appreciate the linguistic and technical merit of their creation, there were some that just left me cold. One of the longest stories, “The Semplica Girl Diaries” about a middle class mother trying to keep up with her neighbors, just could not interest me over its many chapters. Shorter works like “Puppy” and “Home” had a solid concept but I felt had more linguistic style over substance.
Saunders says that he instinctively understands the concepts and execution of short narratives much better than long ones and over the course of years, he extensively re-writes and edits his stories with hundreds of drafts between initial concept and completed work. “If I can be more efficient with the reader, that implies a greater intimacy with the reader”, Saunders has said. Unfortunately, I disagree as I fear that Saunders was too brutal with his editors pen in many of the stories in Tenth of December as the lack of words can create distance, rather than encourage intimacy. There is not a sliver of fat any these stories and sometimes even the most delicious fillet mignon needs a little fat for flavor.
Saunders writing style brings out my own personal failings as a reader more than I’d like to admit. My tendency to skip words or to zone out while reading are sins that Saunders writing does not forgive. A single sentence might be the linchpin that holds the narrative together and if you skim it, you will miss out. Is it fair to blame an author for my own personal failings? Probably not, but compare this to my previous read, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. If I glaze over a paragraph in that, I may miss the exact number of votes a particular bill got. If I glaze over in “Sticks”, I miss half the story.
It would be easy to pigeonhole Tenth of December as a pretentious book. Heavily stylized short stories originally published in The New Yorker by a MacArthur Genius Fellow do lend themselves to such a description. But the accusation of pretension comes shackled to an accusation of agenda, to place your own sense of self-importance above the reader. Yet after listening to Saunders speak, I can’t lay that accusation at his feet. He is open and honest about his writing and his intentions as an author to write in the only way he knows how. He even said that he considered himself poorly and lumpily read. Hardly pretentious.
Tenth of December may be challenging to read at times, and some of the stories may tax your patience but if you connect with just one of them, it will have been worthwhile. It is possible that the format of a short story collection weakened the impact of some of the stories for me; perhaps reading one story every few months in The New Yorker is a better way to experience them, rather than one after the other over a course of a week.
Tenth of December is the book I’ve read this year that I wanted to enjoy more than I did. Not because I want to seem intelligent or sophisticated for liking an author like Saunders, but because I want to share in his joy and passion for the craft. I read Saunders latest book and first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, last year and I connected with it in. His sparse prose conveyed such loss and sadness in a way that I’ve never experienced before. I wish that I felt that way about more of the stories in Tenth of December.
