12 years, one riveting short story
Bestselling U.S. author George Saunders takes his pace, fame in stride
Tenth of December By George Saunders Random House 272 pp; $29.95
It took close to seven years for J.K. Rowling to deliver the first Harry Potter saga. Flaubert laboured for five agonizing years over Madame Bovary. And then, of course, there are the 16 years Jane Austen reportedly spent writing Pride and Prejudice.
George Saunders, a brilliant U.S. writer now dramatically reaching new heights, occupies his own niche. It took him more than a dozen years to complete one of the short stories in his critically acclaimed new book, Tenth of December.
But he’s characteristically matter-of-fact about it. He’s also refreshingly laid back about his sudden explosion into fame — the kind of fame that has just triggered a New York Times Magazine cover story cheeky enough to declare that “George Saunders has written the best book you’ll read this year.”
Meanwhile, here he is, on this wintry afternoon, modestly explaining why a story can take years to get right.
“But not usually 12 years — that was exceptional!” the 54-year-old author concedes with a laugh. He has long enjoyed a devoted cult following and the admiration of his peers — leading in 2006 to a $500,000 “genius” fellowship from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation. But today’s heightened celebrity is something new: volumes of short stories don’t normally end up high on the Times bestseller list. Furthermore, he’s certainly not prolific.
The New Yorker magazine, which embraces every new offering from him, would love to get more. But “I’m kind of a twostory-a-year person. It’s just my pace. I could be a five-story-a-year guy, but they wouldn’t be any good. So I’m happy to be slow.”
The short story with the 12-year gestation period is an item called The Semplica Girl Diaries. It’s part crafty social critique, part science fiction — the kind of science fiction that bleeds eerily into the present.
“There were a lot of technical problems,” Saunders muses, adding, almost as an afterthought: “I think the biggest issue is that it came out of a dream I had.”
A dream? Saunders has just dispatched the kind of zinger that also enlivens his writing. In story after story, he’ll establish an environment that may seem slightly skewed, but not so much that the reader won’t buy into it. And then he springs a surprise, the kind that leaves the reader exclaiming — what?
“To me that’s sort of how life actually feels. You find yourself in some situation which isn’t quite to your liking and isn’t quite understandable to you. So you’re a little bit tilted anyway, and then some other thing comes in and hits you from the side.”
Saunders occupies a less surrealistic world at the moment, fitting comfortably into the bustling atmosphere of the Latte Lounge, a popular meeting spot in downtown Oneonta, a picturesque Catskills community.
He and his wife have a 15-acre rural property here, and he commutes to Syracuse where he teaches in the university’s revered graduate writing program. For him, his life is anchored to other things than literary glory — be it his Buddhist faith, the joy of teaching or walking his yellow Labradors.
Saunders didn’t publish his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, until 1996. It followed a difficult apprenticeship full of false starts, of struggles to find the right tone and voice. Especially voice — or rather voices. His tales now yield a myriad of them — idiosyncratic, funny, mischievous in the way they turn the clichés and conventions of pop culture on their ear, often merciless in skewering society’s absurdities, yet invested with a quiet moral passion.
Literary icon David Foster Wallace once called him the most exciting writer in America. Syracuse University colleague Mary Karr recently went further, telling the New York Times that “he’s the best short-story writer in English alive.”
In response, Saunders gently starts naming short-story writers he himself favours. For example, Canada’s Alice Munro — “a great genius.” There’s this quiet determination to keep his cool amid the mounting hoopla. “It’s OK. The nice thing about this happening at 54 is that it will pass.”
The Tenth of December, his first fictional book since 2006, still bristles with the trademark satire and dark comedy. But the 10 stories also reveal a more humane dimension. The title story takes us into the heads of a desperately lonely youth and a terminal cancer patient determined to accelerate his passing — and tells us what happens when their lives unexpectedly converge.
The creepy Escape From Spiderhead deals with forced pharmaceutical experiments that impose both sexual lust and suicidal impulses on participants. The opening story, Victory Lap, narrated from three distinctive perspectives, examines what happens when a seemingly innocuous stranger arrives on a doorstep. Then there’s Home, which chronicles a troubled soldier’s return home from the wars, and ends against all odds on a fragile note of hope.
“I’m trying, trying, trying to be more accessible without being trivial,” Saunders says. Which perhaps explains those stories that quietly resonate with the possibilities of redemption, reconciliation and simple goodness in human conduct.
“How does goodness occur? If we find ourselves in a situation, how do we manage not to respond badly?” These questions, which intrigue Saunders, lurk in The Semplica Girl Diaries, the story that took a dozen years to write and offers a not-so-distant future in which plastic pink flamingos have yielded to a new middle-class status symbol — Third-World immigrant women strung up on wires on the family lawn as ornaments.