Beautifully bent
His darkly satirical stories have seen him named one of New Yorker’s 20 writers for the 21st century but as George Saunders tells Emma Brockes, when it comes to commercial success, he’s ‘almost dead’.
There is a point in every George Saunders story when the scene he has meticulously created springs a leak, an anomaly just visible in the corner of the eye, and a sign of the terror about to rain down.
In Victory Lap, it is a man standing on a neighbour’s doorstep. In The Semplica-Girl Diaries, it is a seemingly innocent reference to a garden ornament.
‘‘For me,’’ says Saunders, ‘‘the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that’s become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page 3, and the reader’s ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.’’
He calls Tenth of December, his new collection, ‘‘my least disturbing book’’ – a good indication of the slant of his work.
The stories are still extremely sinister, turning on a threat of violence all the more powerful for being withheld, but they allow also for the possibility of people doing the right thing. And while the tone and setting of the stories is often satirical, the interactions are deeply, realistically human.
‘‘My habit would have been to veer towards the dark – to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side,’’ says Saunders.
‘‘Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that’s true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect.’’
We are in a meeting room in Manhattan, in a complex owned by Syracuse University, where Saunders has a residency.
He looks, at 54, like a younger version of William H Macy: Affably dishevelled, fundamentally amused and, in conversation, ignited by the force of his passion.
Tenth of December is alive with ideas, driven by his talent for subtly reframing the world. It took him a long time to get here, says Saunders, who came relatively late to writing and had to overcome a hefty inferiority complex before he found his voice.
By training he is a geophysicist, and in his early 20s he spent a few years working in the oil fields of Sumatra – the kind of life experience that, one might have thought, would have emboldened him to write.
The problem, he says, was one of authority; he hadn’t read enough, then, to feel he had a right to contribute, or any sense of what idiom his contribution might take.
‘‘If you haven’t read you don’t have the voice,’’ he says. ‘‘The lack of voice eliminates experience. I was having all these experiences but they were kind of blocked to me.’’
That it occurred to him to be a writer at all is something he can’t entirely explain.
‘‘I just wanted it so much and I didn’t have any other means of imagining myself into the future. I played music, and I tried to do that, but I didn’t really have the fire. There was just this feeling that I can do this. And unfortunately, I had a kind of a dispositional stubbornness.’’
He had grown up on the south side of Chicago in a mixed neighbourhood.
‘‘It wasn’t John Cheever, but it also wasn’t The Grapes of Wrath. It was just home.’’
It was a comfortable childhood; it was later, in his 20s after returning from Indonesia, that Saunders experienced a period of poverty that would deeply inform his moral view of the world, particularly as it appeared in his writing. It was this, twinned with
‘I played music, and I tried to do that, but I didn’t really have the fire. There was just this feeling that I can do this.’
his years spent as a tech writer, that shaped Saunders’ style: Pared down, thrillingly compact, with everything stripped to its essence.
Compression, he says, is a ‘‘courtesy’’, as well as a ‘‘form of intimacy’’. He teaches his students thus: ‘‘When I’m explaining something to you, if I’m being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you’d have a right to be . . . If somebody respects you enough . . . if we’re in this game together, it’s like a motorcycle and sidecar. If they’re very close together, they can go around corners together. But if it’s way out here – waaaaah.’’
Saunders has never worried too much about the commercial impact of these aesthetic decisions, but he does worry about ‘‘excluding readers because of a weakness in your own approach. In other words, is your edginess a kind of defence mechanism?’’
He would say the same thing about his gravitational pull towards the negative versus the positive experience. In all things, he is motivated by the ambition, just once, ‘‘in prose, to represent the way life actually feels to me. So I don’t really care about commercial so much, except if I was failing to be commercial because I was failing to be human, because I was too afraid, or too technically deficient. Then I would care.
‘‘Commercially,’’ he smiles, ‘‘I’m almost dead, so it doesn’t matter.’’
The period of poverty he went through in his 20s is the moral underlay to all this. It taught him to be lean and efficient and, if he didn’t already, to regard the truisms of his country with a certain scepticism.
He was unemployed when he returned from Indonesia, and ‘‘to come back and be a dope with a college degree who couldn’t find work – to see what America feels like when that happens . . . it was short term, but I got enough to see.’’
There were other fallouts not least in his attitude towards money. To this day, Saunders says, he flinches when using a credit card. When presented with a choice, he instinctively goes for the cheapest option. It also did something to his productivity. Before he won the 2006 MacArthur fellowship, which comes with a $500,000 (NZ$600,000) bursary, Saunders combined writing with full-time teaching and if that meant he only had eight minutes to write in a day, he took them.
Now with a MacArthur and a Guggenheim fellowship behind him, he has the luxury of dividing his time between writing and teaching.
The mental state most conducive to his writing is, he says, ‘‘to be a little bit happy. I goof around until I feel that’’ – and if he doesn’t, he puts his work in a drawer until he feels like returning to it. To this end, Tenth of December took years to complete, interrupted by other writing, and any planned thematic link between stories is coincidental – or, rather, unconscious. By the end, Saunders saw, there was a broad, shared landscape between the stories of either a near future or a parallel present, a kind of Saunders-land that is instantly recognisable to his readers. (Those ornaments in the garden? Turned out to be made of live, developing-world women, rented from an agency and hung from a kind of clothesline – the new, must-have status symbol of the American suburbs.)
Saunders has always been fiercely ambitious for his writing, but lately has refined his idea of what constitutes trying hard.
‘‘I don’t want to get to the end of my life and not have done my best,’’ he says. ‘‘And I’m starting to realise that I always thought the answer was just to work hard. And it’s true, but there’s another component, which is that you have to keep pushing yourself to open up to the widest possible vision of the world. And find a prose style that will make that compelling. And that is a beautiful challenge.’’
Saunders feels under no particular pressure to turn out another ‘‘nine, 12, 15’’ books because, he says wryly, ‘‘I think I’ll probably still die at the end.’’
The interesting thing is somehow to get ‘‘a story down that is true to the way this has all felt’’.
‘‘Even if it’s a four-page story. That would be very nice.’’
He thinks for a moment. The ambition is this: ‘‘I want you to read my book and have it actually matter to you. Not to your constructed literary self. But to you. To the person who has issues and confusions.’’
To Saunders, that’s what a moral is; nothing preachy. Just the fact that one human being can speak to another and say something that is real.