I’ve been reading George Saunders for a
while now. I started with Pastoralia
(2000) and then went back to CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline (1996) before going forward in time with In Persuasion Nation (2006). I have strong
feelings about Saunders and his writing, which I will share with
you now. For one thing, he is reliably terrible with titles. Not since Barry
Hannah has an author so angered me with his short story titles. Here’s a brief
selection from In Persuasion Nation:
“Jon,” “Adams,” “93990” and “Commcomm.” These are essentially cyphers, they are
place holders for a title and have no real meaning or effect on the story until
after I have already read it. Perhaps it is me being old fashioned, but a really excellent
story title gives me just enough to work with, just enough hint of what I may
find in store for me when I embark upon a reading. What’s even more infuriating
is that Saunders does execute the occasional good title, almost all of which
become the title stories for his collections. My favorite title is also attached
to my favorite story of his, “The Falls,” but I’ll get to that.
I place Saunders among the movement that
comes closest to what David Foster Wallace anticipated as ‘The New Sincerity.’ He
often gets put in a literary lineage with Kurt Vonnegut (a personal favorite of
mine) and while they share some key similarities, I think Saunders is
ultimately more of a lyricist than Vonnegut. Ultimately, all of Vonnegut’s
narrators sound the same (like Vonnegut himself) but it’s what they’re saying
that’s more important than how they are saying it. Don't get me wrong, Vonnegut’s voice is a good voice, perfected over a short but crucial period of his career (between his first and second novels, if you can believe it), and works
across the various books. But for Saunders, every character’s voice is
different. Many are ignorant, uneducated, or just coarse with language and
thought (my dissertation chair told me that Saunders' humor often comes at the expense of his characters who are uniformly poor, uneducated, and down trodden, and he's not entirely wrong there). There’s a cadence that captures how his characters feel
and behave and thus there is more nuance and room for gray areas. Three of the
stories from In Persuasion Nation are
told from the point of view of a character who is directly responsible for 1.)
the murder of an entire family 2.) inciting and supporting
mob violence that leads to several deaths and the extermination of most small
animals kept as pets, and 3.) the cold, objective analysis of the
experimentation, torture, and execution of a collection of primates. These were
all painful stories to read, and each sickened me in its own way. But that’s part of the point,
because each of the narrators in these stories believes himself to be in the
right in his actions. There’s also some savage irony at work, particularly in
the primate experimentation story (which has the god-awful title “93990”
mentioned above). In this particular example, the irony is that we as human
readers feel for the primates who are made to suffer under this inhuman experimentation
(which borders on torture, especially for the primate with the number that
shares the story’s title), while the narrative voice maintains a cold,
objective distance through expository reporting. Yet the exposition of the one
primate that survives begins to accrue an intense feeling to it, almost like by
focusing on this one animal and his resilience to all attempts to destroy him,
we still feel the emotional connection that allows us to sympathize and
empathize with him. It’s not exactly what Wallace predicted, with ironic
narrative looping back around on itself to allow for sincere feeling, but
Saunders has made his career out of this kind of postmodern lyricism.
I got to hear Saunders read in 2000 as part
of promotional touring he was doing for Pastoralia.
He read “Sea Oak” which is the big, showy piece from that collection, and it
was a transformative experience to hear him read it aloud. I had read it as
part of a creative writing workshop I was enrolled in at the time and I'll confess that I hadn’t
gotten the story. Hearing him do voices, and the cadence of his speech as he
said certain lines communicated all the comedy that I had been missing. It’s
satiric, yes, but also absurd, and extremely delightful to hear Saunders say in
a performative old lady zombie voice, “Show your cock!” It’s a good story, and
a sad one. Almost all of his stories are sad, even the ones that end well
enough (like “My Flamboyant Grandson” and “Bohemians” from In Persuasion Nation). The best from Pastoralia, though, is “The Falls.” While this blog post takes In Persuasion Nation as its reference
point for Must Read, I would amend that Saunders as author period is must read,
in particular “The Falls.” In that story, two characters are walking along the
bank of a river that leads to the falls of the title and both observe a boat of
young girls travel past them toward the falls. One character is very relatable and
forthright, an overtly good person, and the other is mean and suspicious and
aggravating, an unpleasant person if not a bad one. They both realize that the
girls are in trouble and each has to make a decision about what to do or the
girls will go over the falls and die. As you might expect, each character
behaves antithetical to how we’ve been made to feel about them up to this point.
The aggravating character, who you would never want to live next to or have to
eat a meal with, begins pulling off his clothes, in tears, because he knows that
while he must try and save these girls, he will fail and they will all die. But
in this moment of true courage, facing his fear of an inevitable death that has humiliated and
broken our likable character, this aggravating character transforms into a real
human person, one I would do anything for because he values the need to do the
right thing in a hopeless and impossible situation. The story ends with him in
that moment, and I’ve read few like it that is utterly beautiful in capturing what
miraculous good even a terrible person is capable of (see also Sherman Alexie’s “What You
Pawn, I Will Redeem”(which, by the way, is a fantastic title)).
I didn’t weep at the end of “The Falls,”
though I could now if I read it again. I was emotionally withdrawn due to the
end of a thirteen and a half year relationship when I
read it for the first time a couple of years ago, and the fact alone it got me to acknowledge that the meanest and lowest among us
might be capable of true courage to save another person’s life was miraculous
to me in its own right, tears not included. It’s for this reason, then, that I
am a fan of Saunders, despite my problems and issues with particular aesthetic
choices he makes. There is a sincerity at the center of each of his stories
that evokes the best in me emotionally. What we feel is at least as important
as what we think, and depending on the day, maybe it’s more important.
