Tenth of December by George Saunders
Reviewed by Liz Wyckoff
Short story collections don’t often make headlines. But less than a month ago, George Saunders’ fourth collection, Tenth of December, rocketed onto the literary scene accompanied by this boldly-titled New York Times Magazine article: “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” Since then, the reviewers—from Slate to The Guardian— have continued to gush. Even the notoriously tough book critic Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times Book Review recently affirmed: “No one writes more powerfully … about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised” than George Saunders.
These are exactly the type of characters that populate the stories in Tenth of December: down-on-their luck men, women, boys, and girls finding themselves between a rock and a hard place. Some seem destined for a life of disappointment, like the father in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” who worries constantly about keeping up with his wealthy neighbors. Others seem positively cursed, as does the quiet, emotionally-volatile narrator in “Home,” who has just returned from war to his highly dysfunctional family. Of course, in typical Saunders style, these sad scenarios are tempered—or, really, made more complex—by humorous dialogue and bizarre, futuristic elements. But in my opinion, Saunders’ most-incredible trick is his ability to make his characters feel familiar. He seems to have unlocked some small window into the human brain and translated those synapse firings into words on a page.
When his protagonists lose themselves in daydreams, it is not for the length of one sentence, but for long rambling paragraphs—just the way I get lost in my own thoughts. Also, these stories are full of familiar phrases and expressions that I rarely see in fiction: the parenthetical exclamation point (!) that I’m always using in emails, but never anywhere else; the ha ha ha of sarcastic laughter that we reserve for our most personal communications; the “note to self” we might only scribble onto a Post-It or a journal page. Saunders’ stories are, on the one hand, wild and futuristic and imaginative, but on the other hand, they are about us and our most everyday concerns: fitting in at school; paying off credit card debt; feeling uncomfortable around someone you used to love, about whom you now feel indifferent.
In several recent interviews, Saunders has admitted that he wanted to make Tenth of December more accessible than some of his other books. As he says in Joel Lovell’s New York Times Magazine article, reading fiction “makes you wiser, better, more disciplined in your openness to the experience of other people.” If he aspired to make this book more inclusive, to connect with an even wider audience, then he has certainly succeeded. There may not be another short story collection that receives as much praise this year. But there may not be another author who deserves it as much as George Saunders.
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Copies of Tenth of December are available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com. Saunders speaks about & signs his new book here at BookPeople tonight, Tuesday January 22, at 7pm.
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