George Saunders by David Winter of The New York Times

 

Well, you can imagine a bookseller’s delight upon hearing that the author scheduled at the bookstore that month has written the best book of the year, well, even if it is January. January may be a sparse month for new fiction but it seems there is always a diamond or two to cheer us on through the winter. This year we are lucky to have George Saunders’ new collection of short stories Tenth of December due out January 8. I have to add that I did get the novel chance to start reading an advanced copy on December Tenth.

I started reading and then I had to put this collection back down and let the storm of the holidays pass. Saunders’ kind of whipped me a round a little bit, but I think that’s a good thing.

Joel Lovell writes in The New York Times:

Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.

Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”

And “Tenth of December” is more moving and emotionally accessible than anything that has come before. “I want to be more expansive,” Saunders said. “If there are 10 readers out there, let’s assume I’m never going to reach two of them. They’ll never be interested. And let’s say I’ve already got three of them, maybe four. If there’s something in my work that’s making numbers five, six and seven turn off to it, I’d like to figure out what that is. I can’t change who I am and what I do, but maybe there’s a way to reach those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might not have appealed to. I’d like to make a basket big enough that it included them.”

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Joel Lovell’s article and interview is not just about George Saunders. It also provides insight into the current state of literature. The full article is well worth the read.

I felt comforted by Saunders’ commentary on literature:

“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.” -George Saunders (from the October 2007 issue of O The Oprah Magazine)

George Saunders signs and reads at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 23 at 5:00 and 5:30. Tenth of December is our January First Editions Club pick.

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