George Saunders has this uncanny way of combining the absurd, the tragic, and the painfully human, and he does it so quietly that you almost don’t notice until the weight of it is sitting squarely on your ribs. From the very first story, you feel this creeping tension—life is fragile, messy, and strange, and Saunders is going to make you stare straight at it.
The narratives themselves seem more like peeks at parallel worlds that are nearly ours, only a little askew. An example is Take Victory Lap: a teenage who is desperately attempting to balance morality, danger and love, every minute seems to be floating on the edge of a dangerous precipice. You breathe in and out as he does, and you can feel the nature of that un-assertive, gawking vitality of adolescence, and the sense of high, life-and-death seriousness. The decisions, the little ethical calculations, made by Saunders, are titanic, and every one is suspended breath on your part. The conversation is snatched, the inner monologues become clamped tighter and tighter around your chest and you find yourself asking yourself what you would do in his situation, how much you would go, how much you would risk, and whether you would even be aware of the repercussions before it was too late.
Then there is the almost horror story, dressed as a sci-fi morality play, Escape from Spiderhead. You get the fear building up as the prisoners are administered medication that controls their feelings and wants and you are stuck with them, both spiritually and physically, in that sterile, clinical atmosphere. The moral questions are stifling--what will you do when you cannot have your feeling, your acting, your loving, to be all your own? You can only dream that you are sitting in the chair and your impulses are failing you as you question whether you have agency. It is not the story of the characters, it is the story of you, about those strings that are there in your own lives but which are not seen. You still feel the same even after you have shut the page, such as a shadow that you have never known was trailing you.
The humor of Saunders is not less piercing. The utterances and scenarios are ridiculous in some instances that you find yourself laughing which is almost compulsive because the jokes are interwoven with suffering. Life is absurd, of course, but the absurdity is placed next to heartbreak, loneliness, and human failure. The differences between the outlandishly different views of two mothers on the meaning of taking care of a child are amusing and horrifying in the case of Puppy. You experience the judgment, the anxiety, the necessity to make something good, and it is also too familiar in the most awkward way ever. You laugh but your chest is tight, since Saunders has revealed you the raw human heart beneath the non-sensical.
The general rhythm of the collection is compassion pushed to the utmost extremes. The characters can be imperfect, sometimes unproductive, desperate and still, Saunders does not want to give you an opportunity to look. You experience all the feelings of vulnerability, the desire, the dread, the minute acts of bravery which may sound trifling but which bear the weight of humanity. In the titular story, Tenth of December, you get to witness a man being forced to make a moral decision against mortality, and you are swept up in his panic, his self-examination, his search to find redemption. You experience his heartbeat, the coldness of the snow, the closeness of death and the need to do something right, which causes pain and desperation. Once the connection moment has been reached, the air seems to have changed, and you breathe a little easier, despite the story reminding you how tenuous and temporary these moments are..
The interesting fact about Saunders is that he is capable of living with a variety of emotional truths simultaneously. You laugh, cringe and ache, and once in one paragraph, all three at the same time. It has no clean endings, there are no pat answers, it is nothing but life, and its nasty turns and little favours. You carry these stories around with you, you feel them at the back of your head when you are in quiet moment and then at other times, when the world pushes you into a corner, you recall them and have a weird feeling both of comfort and terror.
And the prose of Saunders--it is simply, simplely, but it cuts. Small sentences, the right choice of words, the interior monologues that penetrate the depths of the psyche of the people you could otherwise overlook, but still you find yourself reflected in them. You are aware of your personal inadequacies, your personal heroics, your personal unheroic deeds. You experience the humanity not on an abstract level, but on the level of living, breathing, writhing entity. The stories are all reflections and Saunders does not allow you to look beyond what is reflected in the stories.
Optimism and pessimism are another aspect that I find really strange with Saunders. He cannot cynicize and, at the same time, he does not romanticize life. Incidents of true affinity, empathy, courage--they are paid, and since they are, they strike you like lightning. You experience the burst of relief, recognition, hope, and the sense of tension that life is unpredictable, at times violent, and rarely just. The startling glance of the darkness of humans combined with the snippets of light is what makes Tenth of December memorable.
When you put the book together, you feel gritty, emotionally sensitive, and very conscious of the brevity and the delicacy of grace. Saunders has brought you into the heads of people who were making inexplicable decisions, and you have their hearts with you. You are left to ponder on what moral choices you made, what actions you took which were brave and which were cowardly, and what you would do when it is time to face the stinging end of life. It is brutal, sure, but strangely reassuring, as it makes you aware that even at our worst, most desperate times we can still find something to sympathize with, to do, to relate to.
Tenth of December is not merely a bunch of stories, it is a plunge into the human heart, clumsy, absurd, heart-wrenching, and even shining. Saunders does not keep you out of the way. He makes you feel everything. You laugh, you wince, you ache, and you think: that is life, and that is perhaps the reason why it is beautiful.
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