I picked this one up because of a challenge. Or maybe it was more of a dare. My youngest sister (*waves* Hi Hannah!) read this collection first, and while she was impressed that the author had the range to write such wildly different stories – many of them in completely different genres – she also found it grim, depressing, and with a truly bleak view of humanity, and by God she wanted someone else to read it so she could have someone to talk to about it.
There are ten stories in George Saunders’s collection Tenth of December, and I tore through all ten of them in about two days. Maybe closer to a day and a half. Readers beware, these are all very dark (with an occasional moment of dark humor), but the author’s writing style flows so easily that it makes for perfect summer reading. But maybe not bedtime reading, since you might have trouble sleeping afterward.
This is the first book by George Saunders that I’ve read, and I’m trying to think of who I can compare his style to. The best I could come up with was he’s a little like Chuck Palaniuk, with maybe a bit of David Sedaris thrown in. There’s that same level of frantic hilarity in places, with the characters going through something that’s obviously based in reality, but taken to such extremes that it starts feeling like a fever dream in places.
We dive right into this sort of thing with, “Victory Lap”. The first person account of a serial predator was disturbing enough (especially contrasted with the idyllic daydreams of the fourteen-year-old girl he’s about to drag into his van), but what made me feel bad was the life of the teenage witness to all of this. Kyle Boot’s parents have a strict, overprotective, micro-managing approach to parenting (threatening to pull him out of his beloved cross-country running for the crime of not having a positive attitude about his chores), and they’ve got him so terrified of taking any action on his own that he actually thinks letting his neighbor get murdered would get him in less trouble than running outside without his shoes while there’s a stranger in the yard.
This kind of unhappy, unsure, obsessing-over-every-useless-detail mindset crops up again and again in these stories. You see evidence of it in “Sticks” (I can almost imagine the father in this story being a sort of worst case scenario of what Kyle Boot’s dad could turn into) and “Al Roosten” (spitefully kicking a more successful man’s wallet under the bleachers turns into an internal monologue about everything wrong with his life that goes on for eight pages) and “Home” (veteran returns from war to a family that’s half losers/half married into wealth, and ponders at length about how you can love your family all you want and it won’t make you happy, or even liked, and what in God’s name is the point of it all?)
They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.
Probably the two hardest stories to get through were “Puppy” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries”. Fair warning, in “Puppy” something bad happens to a puppy. And there’s a reference to something bad that previously happened to a bag of kittens. It’s told from the point of view of two women, and I did find it fascinating that the two of them – each one with a different background and living a completely different life – had the exact same desperately positive outlook. They were even giving themselves the same kind of pep talk. But it didn’t change the fact that I didn’t like either character. And yeah, puppies and kittens. Moving along…
“The Semplica Girl Diaries” was a real struggle to get through. And that’s surprising because there’s an element of the story, referred to at first as an “SG arrangement” that’s so bizarre and disturbing and so gradually revealed that at first I didn’t believe that was really where the author was going. It’s something that could have been its own story, hell, it’s own novel. Instead the story focuses on wanting more and not getting it, about working hard and never seeing the reward, about trying to just once give your daughter something to match the ridiculous lifestyle of her ridiculously wealthy classmate, and having it all go very wrong. And it’s about how we all justify misery because, you know, those people would be going through something so much worse if they weren’t doing…this.
But hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night. (If discouraged, just think of how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!)
(September 5) Oops. Missed a day.
Believe it or not there were a few stories that I liked a lot. “Escape from Spiderhead” is about a drug testing trial where the test medications (complete with trademarks) can do anything. It’s very sci-fi, and as bleak as it was I actually enjoyed it (more on that later). “Exhortation” is hilariously horrific, or horrifically hilarious. Imagine the best/worst manager you’ve ever had, someone who sympathizes with how bad the job is, but who keeps passing along the CEO’s unreasonable demands. Imagine the kind of e-mail you’d get from this manager, made up of equal parts self-help platitudes, heartfelt pleading, and thinly veiled threats. Now imagine the very worst job you could be doing. Whatever you’re picturing, the job in Room 6 is probably worse.
The trademarked medications return in “My Chivalric Fiasco”. Saunders chose a trigger-warning subject matter for this one (sexual assault) and tells a tale of the worst that humanity is capable of, and how no good deed goes unpunished. However. The main character dealing with this is an actor on a Medicated Role: before each performance he takes a drug that makes him talk (and think) in randomly capitalized medieval dialog. Very grim, and also very, very funny.
At this time, Don Murray himself didst step Forward and, extending his Hand, placed it upon my Breast, as if to Restrain me.
Ted, I swear to God, quoth he. Put a sock it in it or I will flush you down the shitter so fast.
The last story, “Tenth of December” is the strongest in the book. This one, along with “Escape from Spiderhead” is also the most uplifting, and for the same reason. What Saunders seems to be saying for the entire book is that life is random and cruel, emotions are based on chemicals and hormones, evil is sometimes just a spur of the moment bad decision (sometimes without any consequences), the drudgery of everyday life turns people small-minded and awful, and no matter how hard you work you’ll never get enough compared to everyone else.
And yet.
What makes all of this terrible is the same thing that gives any hope: because people still care. Things wouldn’t hurt so much if everyone stopped caring, and yet over and over they keep banging their heads against a wall of all of the impossible things that they want. They still want what’s best for their family, they still want to be seen as a good person, even if they suck at it. People spend their lives figuring out exactly what will get them through life with a minimum amount of pain…and then every now and they inexplicably do the exact opposite of that because they can’t sit back and watch something horrible happen for one more second.
Of course that’s just my view. My sister feels that this collection could be described as “Ten Incredibly Different Ways To Make You Feel Horrible”, and she doesn’t really agree with my interpretation of the story “Escape from Spiderhead” as “uplifting,” since it’s tough to be uplifting when the author’s message seems to be “kill yourself horribly, because people are awful.” Hard to argue with that, but I’d still recommend this book. Just take that recommendation with a little caution and a great big grain of salt.