Tenth of December

Tenth of December by George Saunders (2013)

This short story collection has been greatly lauded since it was published earlier this year. I try not to be drawn in by hype and almost skipped it, but remembered how much I enjoyed Saunders' book of essays The Braindead Megaphone. Indeed, I flew through this little book in a couple of days of a busy weekend. It's short but it's so easy to get sucked into his stories so I was through the book before I knew it.

The narrative voices are just amazingly real and clever, and I think that's what propelled me through this collection so quickly. It's hard to describe, but it's very conversational and entertaining and wonderfully fun.

One aspect of his essay collection that had struck me was just how creative and original his writing is, and that's true here as well. As real as the voices and characters are, there are some unexpected elements to some of the stories. "Escape from Spiderhead", which I had already read in The Best American Short Stories 2011, is a piece of science fiction but others have just elements of something that is a bit different, or off.

I think my favorite story was "The Semplica Girl Diaries," which takes place in a world that we're familiar with to a family struggling to keep up with their wealthy neighbors. But one common way to outwardly display wealth is through yard displays of something called SGs. SGs turn out to be domestic workers, immigrants from places like the Philippines and Somalia, who are strung up in arrangements in one's yard. It's justified in the same way we justify hiring women from these countries to clean our houses - their lives are better here, they really need the money to send home to their families, etc. It's a great idea for the story, but what makes it such a standout is that it's written as diary entries from the man who hires them. His struggles as a provider and a father made me sympathize with him and laugh at him at the same time.

It's difficult to write about short story collections because there are so many different stories and characters so you can't really summarize. I will say that I liked every single story in Tenth of December and that they were all very different from each other. Saunders is able to evoke a wide array of emotions in his writing, but through it all is his crazy and wonderful brand of humor. Highly recommended!

The Braindead Megaphone : a review

This book has been on my “to read” list ever since I read George Saunders’ introduction to Nick Hornby’s book The Polysyllabic Spree (or was it Housekeeping vs the Dirt?) Either way, I rarely make it through introductions, much less enjoy them as much as the book they are introducing. But it was clear that Saunders was worth reading. I’m only sorry it took me so long to getting around to reading his book.

It’s hard to describe a book of essays, so I’ll just share some of my favorite passages.

In the title essay, Saunders begins by having us imagine a prehistoric person and thinking about how many voices that person would be exposed to. He then contrasts that with the present day when radio, tv, newspapers and the internet expose us to so many different voices from all over the world, which try (and many of which succeed) to shape our opinions.

He characterizes the direction of this trend by saying, “…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry and inarticulate that all they do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos.”

From “A Brief Study of the British”:
“But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping vague conceptual statement and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.”

His essay “The United States of Huck” was of special interest to me as I just recently read, and disliked, the Twain classic he discusses. I couldn’t ever figure out why it was supposed to be so great, but Saunders explains:
“It is a great work of our national literature because, more than any book before or since, it locates itself squarely on our National Dilemma, which is: How can anyone be truly free in a country as violent and stupid as ours? The book still lives, because the question does.”

(I’m making it sound like he hates America, but keep in mind these are just the quotes I chose. Many of his essays have nothing to do with the current state of the US.)

His essay “Thank you, Esther Forbes” recounts his youthful discovery of the novel Johnny Tremain. He describes her writing with the lovely sentiment, “They were not merely sentences but compressed moments that burst when you read them.”

A couple other pieces in the book recount a trip to Dubai (which prompted me to do a Google image search on Dubai, which I highly recommend), and a trip to Asia to visit a young boy who had allegedly been in a state of meditation for 8 months. His spoof advice column “Ask the Optimist” was another humorous piece, bordering on the ridiculous.

I rarely read essays, but humor makes everything more palatable to me and I found this book very readable and enjoyable.