george saunders

I could go on and on about him, but weirdly enough I think I'm going to sit back and wait for other people to say stuff about him and then come back and be all like "no you're wrong only I truly understand George Saunders."

We should probably have some sort of poll on how conflicted we feel about Saunders working on a Ben Stiller version of CivilWarLand.

saunders is my FAVORITE contemporary author, hands down, and he hasn't even written a novel. i don't care if he isnt capable of writing one.

anyone who hasn't read civilwarland in bad decline needs to get to the bookstore immediately!

he uses different techniques in every story, and they are never particularly pleasant. EVERY one of his stories i have ever read has been disorienting at first, but once you get a grasp of the syntax he is using, you can ease into it...

i don't think he ever intends his language to be aesthetically beautiful.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1440901,00.html

i like Saunders. his language is not "beautiful" but he can capture an image so cleanly and directly that it gives you a jolt and that's where the beauty lies.

take the murder scene from "Isabelle":

Officer Doyle said let's interrogate. Split Lip said i'll show you interrogation. He pushed the teen into the lagoon and held him under. With his club Doyle made Norris watch. The teen's hands slapped and slapped. Then Split Lip stood up and the dead teen floated.

that's the whole scene! that's utterly incredible to me, so much achieved so simply. the scene in "the Wavemaker Falters" where the boy gets churned up in the blades of the wave machine works in a similar way.

his stories are interesting because his cold language seems at odds with his love and empathy for the characters - it verges on sentimentality at times (and i mean that as a compliment). e.g. the point in "Isabelle" where the narrator reveals Boneless's real name "a pretty, pretty name". or in "Civilwarland..." where the narrator gets stabbed right at the end of the story and he thinks of his children and his wife "Sweet Evelyn... i should have loved you better" before hovering over his own death scene (as a ghost) and seeing the traumas his own killer endured as a child. it's breathtaking.

also, he's very funny!

i never finished the novella in "Civilwarland..." though.

it's not often a book can give me chills or make me feel emotional. this scene especially did that to me the first time i read it.

But the thing is that he's not just making fun of that kind of speech, and not just satirizing the "ugliness" of it -- in the end, George is always-always big bleeding-heart empathizer, and at his best he uses that language to cut right into how his characters think, and what they're all about. "Sea Oak" is terrific for that: there's a rich uncle who spouts optimistic banalities about hard work in such a way that you feel he believes it, you understand him -- and even better, when the aunt's grave is desecrated, Saunders pegs the entire role of the policeman simply by putting question marks at the end of his sentences. (I wish I had the book here to quote: I think he says "Typically we find it's teens?" and in that question mark you hear everything -- the desire to be helpful and reassuring, and the complete powerlessness to actually be helpful and reassuring.) Saunders really gets into this kind of language stuff whenever he dips into the language of work, hence my love of the first of his "Four Institutional Monologues," which is possibly another issue.

But just language itself, just the sheer joy of doing gorgeous things with the words -- he's kind of got it, even if it's in his own way. He loves our twisted commonplace constructions ("I personally would love that and you know that. . . . But who would not love that is our landlord"), he loves constructions that make sense even though they shouldn't ("too much grief, as we all know, is excessive"), and above all he love-love-loves the language of exhortation and the inevitable rhetorical questions that come along with it: half of the characters in his stories speak in nearly nothing but strings of rhetorical questions. (E.g., the self-improvement speaker: "Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time -— friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids! -— and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'Thanks so much!' You say, 'Crap away!' You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?'"

And so there you have Saunders-characters in a world of that, and consider this: who else really writes with as much of a moral attachment to banal everyday American life? Oh, yes, he's funny, but the fact is that something like 80% of his first two books consisted of stories about the same thing: people working terrible jobs for necessary money, and making moral decisions about where exactly that becomes a problem. (The other 20% = people who can't get other people to like them!) And the worthwhile thing about this guy has far less to do with the language than it has to do with his skill in making those concerns work, with getting that big bleeding heart to function perfectly in a shocking number of his stories. On the surface, they seem like they might be jokes about schlubs and grotesques and comical losers in comical situations, but they near-immediately become about genuine moral crisis, and the last story in Pastoralia feels like the best indicator of exactly that: it gives us the comical schlub, running through his everday fantasies of people actually liking him for a change, and then he spots two girls trapped in a canoe and about to tip over a waterfall, and the damn thing ends with him stripping down to swim out and try to save them, thinking as he does it that he'll never make it there, he'll obviously drown. That's the moral life of the Saunders character, really, and it comes up in little details everywhere -- I'm looking over "Sea Oak" online and it's everywhere, in the sad bitterness of the zombie aunt, but most of all in a little reminiscence of a high-school girlfriend: "Angela had dreams. She had plans. In her notebook she pasted a picture of an office from the J. C. Penney catalogue and under it wrote, My (someday?) office." Lovely! What more empathy do you want for basic human hopes and dreams than that! And so how exactly like life does it seem that the only other thing Angela writes, a break-up note, begins with just a string of cliches: "You will always be my first love. . . . But now my path converges to a higher ground. Be well always. Walk in joy."

And so yes, I love Saunders, because the more that I think about it, the better of an idea he seems. He sees the modern world and modern language in a way that's unique but at the same time easily-accessible to everyone else around him. He's base-level funny enough to potentially be incredibly super-popular, which would be a terrific thing for literature. And if it happened, we wouldn't even have to complain about how he's a bad candidate for it, because he isn't: inside his stuff is a writerly moral sense and a genuine gut-level sense of meaning that do things other media have lots of trouble with.

New Yorkers, Saunders doing a reading at the Chelsea 6th Ave B&N this Monday.

Anyway: I dunno if it's a story of a woman "going to pieces," since the whole point of it lies in the opposite surface impression -- that she comes back collected, functional, no-nonsense, and full of plans. She also comes back a monster. So I don't know if "to pieces" is a very good way of putting it: she's more of an exaggerated shade of the uncle (or stepfather?), whose success seems to have come at the expense of something that the narrator would prefer to hold on to. A lot of Saunders' stories are very similar, but there's actually a level on which I like seeing him work with that consistency of concern: "Sea Oak," like everything else, becomes about what exactly it would mean "becoming" to get ahead, how much needs to be sacrificed to accomplish it, and whether the steps required to accomplish it are the right way to situate one's mind at all.

And the thing that separates Saunders from how most of yr Woods-style hysterical-realists on this is where he comes down on that, and how naturally -- the guy does try to accomplish it, somewhat sadly, and somewhat because he can't explain to the ghost why life isn't fair (and maybe doesn't want to have to not-explain the same thing to his nephews).

Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

Which is not bad as a genre for a critic to identify, but there are times when his stern disapproval of the thing amounts to saying "god damn it, these young writers are trying to be funny and entertaining and take childish delight in the very acts of writing and reading," which I'm not sure is really the most productive way to criticize that stuff; one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing, some feeling of joy and freedom in the acts of reading and writing themselves -- not terrible things to introduce into literature right now.

Plus it bleeds over into going "oh, whatever, hysterical realism" every time someone tries to do anything fun at all -- Saunders is a pretty focused (even samey!) short-story writer, not a scattered hysteric, but he brings one old lady back from the dead and it's all "yeah, hysterics."

(There remains a slight generational "thing" around that, actually, one that I never see older people acknowledge. Wallace had something interesting about that in his television essay, from, what, fifteen years ago? And still I'll see older people advise writing techniques such as introducing every character with an overview of appearance, to which some younger people invariably react badly: "If we cared what everyone looked like we'd be in the film program!")

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):

show your cock, sleek metal hole, lime crone, pink crone, attitudinal difficulties, bag from the bottom, heavy girl, your oatmeal, small bugs

I think Nab. sounds a bit daft saying: "one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing". He sounds a bit like (heaven help me)... Dave Marsh. I don't think Wood is stern, particularly. He is an aesthete, with a limited patience for sociology/cultural theory/pomo posturing. To put it bluntly, he wants novels about people rather than novels about ideas. As such, he is a timely response to the over-rating of DFW in the US and, especially, Rushdie in the UK.

Funnily enough, Wood is younger than many of the HRers he criticises.

which ones?

http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/real-as-hell-a-conversation-with-george-saunders

^ great

I just finished Pastoralia, which is my second Saunders book. I think "Sea Oak" is one of the best short stories I have ever read. I have been wanting to talk about it with somebody, but my wife, a Joycian who doesn't read anything written after 1945, refuses to read postmodern fiction of any kind, at least until she finishes her dissertation (which is fair). So happy to have this thread, then, and nabisco's great posts, which are some of my favorite posts I've read on ILX. It was great to read such an articulate analysis of Saunders' use of language, and why it's so effective:

there's a rich uncle who spouts optimistic banalities about hard work in such a way that you feel he believes it, you understand him -- and even better, when the aunt's grave is desecrated, Saunders pegs the entire role of the policeman simply by putting question marks at the end of his sentences. (I wish I had the book here to quote: I think he says "Typically we find it's teens?" and in that question mark you hear everything -- the desire to be helpful and reassuring, and the complete powerlessness to actually be helpful and reassuring.)

The FIRPO story really got to me, too. It was like a Carver story narrated by the doomed child instead of the unhappy parents of the doomed child. "Winky" and the one about the barber were just ok, but I really loved the rest.

Anyway, I've read CivilWarLand In Bad Decline (though it's been years and I think I want to read it again; someone gave it to me as a gift a long time ago in an attempt to get me to quit reading Sedaris), and now, Pastoralia. Which one next?

Diminishing returns? I'm half way into The Tenth of December and finding it not good and his concerns and ticks too repetitive. I mean, I know it's apt to have a character think an absurd or mundane thought then think "ha ha" and wrote that but he's used it in every story bar one so far. And the ending of "escape from the spiderhead" is the exact ending he's used in two stories in previous collections. People have spoken highly of" the semplica girl diaries" but I couldn't really believe the idea of the SGs in the first place and then the story tails off in a not very interesting way rather than actually ending. There are a few like that too. The only story I thought was good thus far was the two page one called "Sticks".

I enjoyed the narrative language of the SG diaries but couldn't actually work out what it had to do with the character of the narrator and spent the first half of the story thinking of the zen koans on t-shirts thread on I'll and thought the narrator was meant to me writing in a second language. Didn't really make any sense to me, anyway.

On ilx not I'll

escape from spiderhead is pretty bad -- takes a bunch of themes he's done before, makes the real-life parallels obvious, puts in a christian sacrifice at the ending. i liked most of the others.

i don't even remember spiderhead. is it the one with the old dude trying to kill himself? i liked that one. i didn't like most of the others.

i think i liked it best of his books, the writing is very virtuoso

that's the worst thing about it

that doesnt make any sense

spiderhead = testing emotion drugs on people

i. i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.
ii. there's been a real flattening of idea and of sentiment that's gone along with this

though i think 'tenth' is probably less bad than the one that came out when i was an undergraduate, which i overrated at the time, because of how i was an undergraduate

the semplica girl diaries is--to use a phrase which seems to be becoming so much popular on ilx that we could probably abbreviate it--a little too on the nose

i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.

this is the sentence that killed david foster wallace

(not a disagreement. i haven't read saunders recently.)

fair

I don't really like his sci-fi stories. The final story in Tenth is completely devastating though. Otherwise the ones that have stuck with me are the first story with the child abduction, and the one with the puppy and the kid tied to the tree.

i. i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, October 11, 2015 3:59 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk he always seemed a lil too literal and proud of himself to really communicate any sort of deep ~interiority~ or w/e he is often an astonishingly good writer tho and funny

I read him for the yuks tbh -- that affected affectlessness.

fairly tepid review of the novel

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/the-sentimental-sadist/513824/

I'm guessing that's a deliberate hit job, but it doesn't really encourage me to pick up the novel, either.

There was a point when Persistent Gappers of Frip came out, and I started to think, "You know, maybe this guy isn't very good anymore" and the voice kind of curdled on me. I haven't read Tenth of December, but is it fair to say everything since Pastoralia is just more of the same? Even at the time (although it's very good) Pastoralia felt like a retread. At this point it seems like his interviews are more enjoyable than his writing.

pretty much

tenth of december is great imho, and i went in thinking i was kinda sick of him, similar themes to his earlier work but the prose is more dynamic or something

A bit more than "similar" IMO. I thought it was rotten. I liked that one page story called "pole" though.

Have enjoyed most of his work, but 400p is not the length at which i want to read it.

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Leomon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.

D'oh! The Lemon Grove, of course. I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

I read CivilWarLand when the paperback came out in the mid-90s, when it was a good bridge between the sci-fi I read as a teenager and the Proper Literature I pretended to like in my twenties. Anyway, it's amazing (or so I remember) but the shtick probably doesn't come across as original as it seemed at the time, if only because it's been imitated so often (especially by Saunders).

That Lemon Grove thing seemed fun in the excerpt on Amazon.

I've only read 10th of December but found it fantastic, especially The Semplica-Girl Diaries which can be read online http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-semplica-girl-diaries

should probably read his older stuff

The NYorker has a ton of Saunders stuff avail to read

Lincoln in the Bardo was an inspiring read. Can't think of another contemporary American author with such an impressive grasp of language and style. It's both straightforward and experimental, postmodern and touching, even spiritual. I'm going to check out his early work when I get the chance.

Oh yeah, and of course it's very funny too.

The cacophony of voices and styles is elegantly integrated with the themes and narrative, really just a very clever way of telling the story, surprisingly easy to follow.

I've heard so-so things about it but you've just convinced me to give it a shot

Great! I'm not sure I'd want to argue that it's perfect in every way, but I def think it's an enjoyable read all the way - and even though it's labeled as a novel, it's really more written in the style of a drama which means you read it in no time

this story is very lovely!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/21/george-saunders-fox-8-short-story-man-booker-prize-lincoln-bardo

oh yeah, and he won the Booker Prize.

did anyone other than niels on here read lincoln in the bardo? i picked it up the other day and there is no way in hell i could read that book. that looked like the kind of book that people buy and then never finish but maybe i'm just dumb.

Same. I’ve read his other stuff but could only make it through the beginning

i read it and loved it, but i could totally see picking it up and not finishing it.

i like his style a lot but, like carver, he's spawned a lot of imitators, and his style has some limits.

his turns toward the sentimental can be heartbreaking and also veer toward sap

I liked it a lot, but it took a minute to get going iirc.

you aren't alone, scott. I got about halfway through it and realized I had no desire to continue down that path. It felt like a song stuck on repeat.

it does take a minute to get going, and to figure out that most of the characters are talking to themselves and not really responding to other characters. it's a series of overlapping narratives, which makes sense from a writer of short stories.

I mean, it is about purgatory.

xp

I listened to the full cast audiobook. I think that's the way to get it done. Although, I will say that our book club (we are all Saunders fans) liked it in any format.

xp - Not quite purgatory. That's where one expiates one's sins in order to become purified and ascend to heaven, but the bardo, where regrets and desires keep one tethered to a past life, unable to move on to the next. So the bardo is a fruitless stasis. That makes for a tough challenge in terms of narrative and Saunders means of handling that challenge bogged down too much to repay me for the effort of finishing it.

His mix of gleeful cruelty and sappy sentimentality sets my teeth on edge. Liked the first couple of collections but it's been diminishing returns since then.

i finished L in the B, it did seem like a short story idea stretched out to novel length. Some of it was quite moving, some of it struck me as emotionally manipulative, either way it didn't make me want to read anything more by him.

i had never read any Saunders until Lincoln in the Bardo & i really loved it, i found it very moving.