I enjoyed George Saunders‘ book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone and his earlier story collection, In Persuasion Nation. The New York Times Magazine has already anointed Tenth of December as the best book of the year. In the article making that bold proclamation, Saunders is also interviewed. It’s a very interesting read that gives you the sense of him as human being as well as insight into his writing process. He sounds like a humble and hardworking guy as well as a genius. Even daunted by a) feeling I can’t add much to what’s been said about Saunders or this book and b) being embarrassed to gush about a writer I admire so much, here goes.
The stories in this collection are mostly set in places that seem very much like ours except something is just different enough to give you a slightly off-balance feeling as you read, while you get your bearings in the strange land of Saunders’ imagination. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” poor immigrants come to America to be “SG’s” — they are strung by a microline through their heads and hang on racks as yard decorations. Other than that, the setting is completely familiar. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” young criminals are sent to a center for pharmceutical experiments in lieu of jail. The experiments test emotion-setting drugs that can temper the amount of love people feel.
In “Home,” which is mostly about a returned war veteran whose family is completely changed (mother has a live in boyfriend and is being evicted, sister married a jerk and has a baby, wife left him and remarried), there is one detail that makes us feel as strange as the veteran does: a store selling plastic tags reading “MiiVOXmax and MiiVOXmin.” Neither the reader nor the characters really learn what they’re for. In “Victory Lap” the boy whose parents are very controlling must place a geode in the yard before they come home. We never learn why.
The stories aren’t really about these weird details. “Victory Lap” is about calling upon your true nature in a crisis — even this boy, whose parents have molded his life so firmly, can find a reservoir of strength in an emergency even though it violates many of his parents’ rules. “Home” is about the futility of war, its impact on the ones who go, and the disjointedness that results when those at home are completely disconnected from their emotional wounds. “Escape from Spiderhead” is a commentary on the our culture’s dependence on and trust in pharmaceutical solutions. In the way other normal human emotions and variances in personality have been made into “conditions” to be treated, Saunders writes of love as a treatable disease.
Other stories are set in places not discernibly different than our own. These are just as moving, tragic even. “Puppy,” which juxtaposes two mothers each trying to do their best for their families, might be the most heartbreaking story I’ve ever read. “Sticks,” in just two pages, tells the story of a man desperate to tell his kids there’s more to him than the emotional absence he’s offered, as he decorates a pole in the yard, his “one concession to glee.” The narrator says, “We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic.”
Both “Exhortation,” a story in a memo which captures the strange futility of a contemporary workplace filled with rules, rubrics, and benchmarks, and “My Chivalric Disaster,” about a man working at a medieval re-enactment whose dose of KnightLyfe (a drug that makes him speak in Renaissance style) causes him to act chivalrous to disastrous result, address the ways low skill, low pay work, when combined with unthinking or overbearing management, creates a system in which people live in either (or both) physical or psychological poverty, unable to express themselves and sapped of a sense of self.
The title story is beautiful, strange, and sad, a tribute to the imaginative powers of childhood and the redemptive resources of old age, to the pain of being rendered helpless by illness and infirmity and the reckless hope of youth that drives us to overcome helplessness, to believe in our own big hearts. I can’t imagine a story that better balances those experiences.
I love a book that makes me think and also entertains and Saunders’ writing consistently does that. The issues he ranges over are big and current — he is holding a mirror up to contemporary American culture. But he’s doing it in a fun house, showing us how silly we look with just a slight distortion of the smooth glass we normally gaze into. It’s not a hopeless book though, and there are glimpses of humor even in the most tragic stories. The questions Saunders raises would be fun to discuss in a book group.
bookconscious 