Although sentiment has always lurked beneath the antic, corrugated surface of Mr. Saunders’s work, there is a new sympathy for his characters in these pages, an emphasis on how bad luck, poor judgment, lack of resources and family misfortune can snowball into violence or catastrophe … In story after story there is a chasm between the characters’ fantasies and the grinding boredom of their daily existence, between their aspirations to wealth and wisdom, and the derailing of their dreams through foolishness, impulsivity or the simple passage of time … It’s a measure of Mr. Saunders’s talents as a writer — his brassy language, his narrative instincts, his bone-deep understanding of his characters — that he takes what might have been a contrived and sentimental parable and turns it into a visceral and moving act of storytelling.
It’s almost hard to fathom how a writer this good could get better. But he has. A lot better, even … Most of the stories in Tenth of December are like this: They grapple in a forthright way with forthright moral questions. Saunders has always been a daring writer, but here he’s trying something very risky indeed; he’s going to tell you exactly what he’s thinking about. He might even go so far as to offer a prescription. He’s gambling that he can sacrifice a crucial creative ambiguity—what does this story mean?—at the altar of his own otherworldly talent, wagering that he can show you his cards and win the hand anyway.
In Tenth of December, his fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran’s post-traumatic impulse to burn down his mother’s house — all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are … Yet despite the dirty surrealism and cleareyed despair, Tenth of December never succumbs to depression. That’s partly because of Saunders’s relentless humor; detractors may wonder if they made a wrong turn and ended up in the land of the joke after all. But more substantially it’s because of his exhilarating attention to language and his beatific generosity of spirit.
In one way or another, all the tales in Tenth of December, his amazing new collection of stories, are about the tragedy of separation. What distinguishes it from the three equally fine collections that have preceded it is the added pinch of semi-sweet salvation, an ingredient most other satirists diligently avoid for fear of ruining their sour-by-design recipes … When he’s in his satirical mode, Saunders prefers to set his critique in the degraded world we’re heading toward rather than the merely compromised one we’re living in … Each one of these is as funny and off-kilter and formally ingenious as you want a Saunders story to be, but each one is also something else: unabashedly tender.
Saunders performs the most rigorous of his cultural biopsies, examining with unsqueamish fidelity the tangled hopes and fears of our great midsection — suburban fathers and mothers, nine-to-fivers, minimum wagers, a soldier, a prisoner, a rapist — and providing a prognosis of the ‘no guilt’ capitalism that has apparently already (pretty much) won … These stories, however, are not about corporate greed or globalized homogeny (though its effects are palpable), but about the average citizen, decent and well meaning, trying to excavate some hospitable nook within a system that has not favored them.
The new stories give the impression of imagined worlds pared back until they’re not too different from our own, just a little uncanny. Most of the mayhem transpires within families or between neighbours, and class conflict is often the animating force. The settings are only glimpsed, and language does the job of making the goings-on strange … The rescues and escapes in a few of these stories run along clear moral lines: the trapped should be set free; the drowning should be pulled out from under. All that’s needed is for a hero to come forward from the cast of sad sacks … There’s no shortage of brutality in Tenth of December. To hold a few happy endings against Saunders or to suggest he makes his characters too sympathetic, as I’m inclined to do, is churlish: a comic writer can kill off only so many of his characters.
Mr. Saunders's characters cling to hope as tenaciously as ever in his new collection, Tenth of December, set in a kind of Dark Ages middle America defined by Darwinian class striving, simulated bread-and-circus distractions (Mr. Saunders is fascinated by amusement parks and reality television) and the substitution of bureaucracy for ethics … Many of the stories are about average people facing extreme tests of moral or physical courage…[they] powerfully dramatize the author's belief that heroism springs from selflessness and compassion.
In Tenth of December, humor and satire infuse dysfunctional families, dysfunctional sex, unsuspected heroism, realism and near future settings in 10 short stories from short-short length to full length. With laughter, frequent shudders and always an accessible rigor that fellow writers have come to love and expect in Saunders’ work, this collection — mostly realism — does not disappoint. For the most part … The stories are a fun and often gut-punching ride. They will make you question your manhood. Womanhood? No, but they are decidedly human. And they fulfill one of Saunders’ self-proclaimed goals, diversity of readership.
That's classic Saunders, with its use of the vernacular, the specific language of a character, to get at material that is both elusive and profound … What Saunders is evoking is compassion, which is, it turns out, the defining sensibility of the book... these are conflicted people, in over their heads and struggling to stay afloat. They want to do the right thing, but they don't always, or even often, know what that is … Saunders deftly traces the back and forth, the debate to get involved or not to get involved, which every one of us has experienced. Talk about compassion: We are weak, flawed and frightened and petty, and yet every day, we have the opportunity to be strong.
While some of the fiction here trucks in the high jinks we’ve come to associate with a Saunders story — the crazy venues and vocations — many of the stories break new ground, even as they reprise some of Saunders’s more familiar obsessions … What’s at stake here — and, I’d argue, throughout all of Saunders’s work — is moral fortitude and forgiveness and how these qualities can be mobilized in the effort to be good — a good parent, a good kid, a good person … He’s got one of the most refined and sensitive empathic facilities of any writer I know.
His defiant quirkiness is tempered with a dark sobriety and a sense that the world we live in is often more surreal and savage than any satire could be. Tenth of December isn't just the author's most unexpected work yet; it's also his best … The standout of Tenth of December, though, is ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries,’ a story that's remarkable for its originality and unrelenting sadness...It's possibly Saunders' strangest short story to date, but it's also one of his most realistic, and that's what makes it so horrifying … Saunders is one of America's best writers of fiction, and that his stories are as weird, scary and devastating as America itself.
The title story might be the best thing Saunders has ever written, and it's completely, heartbreakingly realistic. The fantastic enters naturally, as elements of a child's fantasy life … The new stories are seamless. The comedy of characters whose inner monologues discover them misusing words is naturalized when the monologues are those of children whose reading has given them vocabularies that outstrip their understanding … Saunders’ prose sings like {appropriately whimsical avian simile}. Saunders' ventriloquism often requires him to write pseudo-badly, and no else writes pseudo-badly so not-pseudo-beautifully.
As usual with Saunders, the first thing you notice is the language, the exhilarating explosion of slang, neologisms, fake product names. The reader is wired into the protagonists' heads, the stories told either in the first person or in a third person that moulds itself around the characters' thoughts, taking on their voices … Yet for all the successful stories, some of Tenth of December feels like it could have been lifted straight out of Saunders's previous collections...If this collection does edge in a new direction, it is in Saunders's slight shuffle towards realism, away from the more wildly imaginative stories that dominated his earlier books.
George Saunders captures the fragmented rhythms, disjointed sensory input, and wildly absurd realities of the 21st century experience like no other writer. He is satiric without being sarcastic, ironic yet compassionate … Like Kurt Vonnegut before him, Saunders is morally acute and attuned to injustice. In this new collection, he also shows a new, more tender side. Even his writing about dark subjects like violence and suicide is shot through with illumination. In the best of these new stories — ‘Victory Lap,’ ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries,’ and ‘Tenth of December’ — Saunders swings wide the gates and ushers us into the human realm with all its ambiguities.
Literature that takes the sort of chances that Saunders does is rarely as much fun as his is. Even when he is subverting convention, letting the reader know throughout that there is an authorial presence pulling the strings, that these characters and their lives don’t exist beyond words, he seduces the reader with his warmth, humor and storytelling command. And these are very much stories of these times, filled with economic struggles and class envy, with war and its effects, with drugs that serve as a substitute for deeper emotions (like love) and perhaps a cure (at least temporary) for what one of the stories calls ‘a sort of vast existential nausea.’
