On “Tenth of December” by George Saunders ****

 

I'm referencing the collection in the title, not just the story, which is the last story in this collection.

I first became familiar with Saunders not long after his first collection was published, Civil War Land in Bad Decline. I liked the title, but what really got me to read the book was the fact that a friend of mine was a huge fan of it and thought our story styles were somewhat similar. (That was a huge and unwarranted compliment, honestly, given what Saunders has gone on to be and what I have not.) Alas, I was not that impressed with the collection outside the story “The 400-Pound CEO.” Saunders's stories were weird and dark, but they often didn't really add up to much to me, didn't have much emotional resonance.(What we had in common, in the estimation of my friend, I'm guessing, was the darkly comic and sometimes weird.)

A few years later, I read the story “Pastoralia” in a Best American Stories collection and was very impressed. I love that story. But I never got around to reading Saunders again, until now, with this collection.

Alas, this collection strikes me much as that first collection did. It was enjoyable, but I didn't feel like I got much out of most of the stories.

Except, like the story “Pastoralia,” there is one story that blew me away, and that is the very first, “Victory Lap.” I heard the first part of the story read on a podcast and wasn't that interested. And I wasn't that interested reading that first section this time. But at the first break, that's when things get really interesting. The story is a lot like Joyce Carol Oates's “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” insofar as it involves a young gal taking up with (or better, being taken up by) a much older man in a sinister kidnapping way. But it goes in a different direction from there. The piece is about childhood and about ideals that we have and also about how we reconcile our values, as kids, the sometimes instructions we are given, and what is right and wrong in a given circumstance. And it's about the end of innocence, even as its about its preservation. It's just marvelous.

And with that sort of beginning to the collection, maybe it's natural that the rest of the collection was something of a disappointment. After reading one of the best stories I've ever read, nothing was going to match it and everything was going to be comparatively a disappointment.

Many of the stories focus on class differences, and like “Pastoralia” and “The 400-Pound CEO,” many focus on weird dynamics of work and office and its attendant, sometimes absurd rules. All are dark and many are funny, but like that first collection, many didn't really spark an emotional connection for me.

“Sticks” is a short short about a trash heap and moving. “Puppy,” probably my second favorite in the collection (because it has a modicum of the emotional connection), is about a rich mom and her kids and how she tries to protect them as they go to adopt a puppy—and also about a poor mom and her kid as she tries to sell said puppy. The latter's circumstances are shocking, and some of these go beyond class, I am sure, but much of them go directly to the opportunities that family has had in life versus the first. The misunderstanding and the rich woman's resolve at the end make this piece devastating.

“Escape from Spiderhead” was a sex dream, I suppose, with comments about science and culture and class as well, as prisoners are given drugs that change their emotions in ways that can lead to death and love. “Exhortation” was an absurdist office memo about making better (sales) numbers. “Al Roosten” is about one of those celebrity auctions with local celebrities and a man who feels he hasn't done enough with his life and regrets the action it takes him toward. “The Semplica Girl Diaries” focuses on a family trying to keep up with the Joneses, essentially, which involves a strange form of keeping personalized third-world slaves. “Home”—probably my third favorite—involved a military vet who did something vaguely horrible during his military service that has all his family vaguely disowning him on his return. It shows up the kind of superficial respect we give to the military even as we reject their actual needs. (Probably most heartbreaking is the way in which the man's own wife had run off with someone else while he was away, and now he's locked out of his kids' lives.)

“My Chivalric Fiasco” returns to the office, focusing on a discovered affair and written in faux medieval language. The title story, the final one in the book, returns to the world of teenage fantasy, as a boy wanders out into the woods on a cold day dreaming of a gal and discovers an old man intent on killing himself—only to have the circumstance completely turn on itself.