In a recent interview on KCRW’s Bookworm, the show’s host, Michael Silverblatt, suggested to his guest, George Saunders, that suffering as our state on earth lies at the root of his work. Saunders replied that what really gets him about suffering is that there’s clearly something inside of all of us— something wonderful, sacred, filled with light— that’s always being messed with, and however often we are so messed with from without, whether by corporations, The Man, etc., we are just as often messed with from within ourselves. As Saunders puts it, “Sometimes it’s The Man, but sometimes The Man is in you— it’s your internal voices, it’s just your inability to articulate, it’s your nerves, it’s your failure to rise to the occasion.” He concludes by summarizing his central focus: “I’m interested in the thought-stream, because the thought-stream is most often the thing that subverts our good intentions.”
It’s an unexpected insight from a writer who’s made his name warping the grotesqueries of life in the soul-hating glare of contemporary consumer culture into a bloodthirsty, big-hearted satire destined to lend future cultural criticism the term “Saundersesque”: the notion that the real wolf at the door is already in the house. This conception of suffering as the basic state of man, and our own thought process as the culprit, may ring pessimistic, or God forbid negative, to the ear bludgeoned by the daily stream of motivational language that keeps us global citizens taking our place in the traces day after day, but it’s also at the root of Buddhist thought. Existence is suffering, so it goes; relief comes by following the Eightfold Path, the backbone of Buddhist practice. And one of that eightfold is a virtue often translated as “right thought,” which can be broadly defined as cultivating thoughts of love and helpfulness. Which might sound Hallmark until you think about how often we invoke such thoughts as inspiration to get to work on time, at which point right thought starts to look downright subversive.
It turns out that Saunders is a practising Buddhist. And, as anyone who’s ever attempted any kind of meditation practice would know, stilling that thought-stream so that reality can filter through is more or less the point of it all. It’s also staggeringly hard to do, a simple task requiring a lifetime of practise. This isn’t a statement that requires much in the way of evidence; try holding any single thought or image in your head for thirty seconds without some other thought wandering in. If you can, you’re a mind ninja, and you can go back to manipulating your cat’s heart rate or whatever mind ninja stuff you spend all day doing. If you’re normal and you can’t, it follows that you’ve probably experienced some suffering at the hands of your own mind. But don’t worry, it’s OK. Saunders is writing for us.
As in his three previous collections of short fiction, the characters in Tenth of December inhabit a you-just-took-all-the-brown-acid nightmare America, a landscape of the gouged-out soul where everyone thrashes in a chemically-altered stew of corporate-speak, commercial mindfuckery, and economic rape, numbed by the exhaustion and terror of wondering if they’ll be the next one spooned into the gibbering mandibles of late-stage capitalism.
The stories scan as surreal, but only until you spend half a second regarding, say, the medieval theme park of “My Chivalric Fiasco” in the light of any actual theme park you’ve been to, wherein you quickly realize that he’s not even turning up the volume; he’s just pointing. In that story, a janitor at said amusement destination is promoted to the position of Pacing Guard in exchange for his silence on the matter of a sexual assault. The role comes with a patented medication, KnightLyfe, which our hero is excited about— nearly all of the invented medications Saunders peppers his stories with are gratefully accepted, and you can sure as hell see why— but which leads him, in a haze of chemical chivalry (we’ve all been there) to out the crime and end up, along with the victim, terminated. It’s the lightest story in the collection, both in tone and mechanics, but its heart is as black as tar.
The riff is expanded in “Escape from Spiderhead,” one of a number of stories from the collection that originally appeared in TheNew Yorker. Set in a facility where pharmaceutical experiments are conducted on convicted murderers, our reader surrogate, a guy just out of his teens who lost his shit during a fight and killed another kid with a brick, is, along with a handful of other offenders, manipulated with test drugs that variously wrench them in and out of love, inflate their verbal abilities, enhance their perception of nature, and, sickeningly, torture them with floods of unendurable depression.
Both stories work similar ground, dealing with the way the casual dicking of the human mind is accepted as a natural activity of private enterprise, all part of our culture’s cosmic destiny to plant a barcode on literally everything we can apprehend. What Saunders wants to show us, however, runs deeper than the rote violation familiar from everyday life at the feet of our corporate pharaohs. Both stories make literal what is elsewhere in Tenth of December represented as merely de facto, namely the colonization of our inner selves— our dreams, loves, our idiosyncrasies, our preferences, passions, longings— via the Psy-Ops of a parasitic advertising industry whose entire purpose is to spiritually prep us for the strip mining of our consumer potential.
Freaky, right? So when this is the beat we’re all marching to, it can’t come as any surprise that what we get in place of right thought is Saunders’s specialty: internal monologues rendered in a desperate staccato of musings, fantasies, delusions, and anxieties that bombard the characters seemingly both from within and without like the frenzied demands of a worked-up studio audience, informed in equal measure by the twin implanted languages of self-help (“Thank you, Lord… You have given me so much: struggles and the strength to overcome them; grace, and new chances every day to spread that grace around”) and sales (“When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on haybale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps?”) that are alternately hilarious and devastating.
Random House | 272 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0812993806
‘Tenth of December: Stories’ by George Saunders
Book Reviews
In a recent interview on KCRW’s Bookworm, the show’s host, Michael Silverblatt, suggested to his guest, George Saunders, that suffering as our state on earth lies at the root of his work. Saunders replied that what really gets him about suffering is that there’s clearly something inside of all of us— something wonderful, sacred, filled with light— that’s always being messed with, and however often we are so messed with from without, whether by corporations, The Man, etc., we are just as often messed with from within ourselves. As Saunders puts it, “Sometimes it’s The Man, but sometimes The Man is in you— it’s your internal voices, it’s just your inability to articulate, it’s your nerves, it’s your failure to rise to the occasion.” He concludes by summarizing his central focus: “I’m interested in the thought-stream, because the thought-stream is most often the thing that subverts our good intentions.”
It’s an unexpected insight from a writer who’s made his name warping the grotesqueries of life in the soul-hating glare of contemporary consumer culture into a bloodthirsty, big-hearted satire destined to lend future cultural criticism the term “Saundersesque”: the notion that the real wolf at the door is already in the house. This conception of suffering as the basic state of man, and our own thought process as the culprit, may ring pessimistic, or God forbid negative, to the ear bludgeoned by the daily stream of motivational language that keeps us global citizens taking our place in the traces day after day, but it’s also at the root of Buddhist thought. Existence is suffering, so it goes; relief comes by following the Eightfold Path, the backbone of Buddhist practice. And one of that eightfold is a virtue often translated as “right thought,” which can be broadly defined as cultivating thoughts of love and helpfulness. Which might sound Hallmark until you think about how often we invoke such thoughts as inspiration to get to work on time, at which point right thought starts to look downright subversive.
It turns out that Saunders is a practising Buddhist. And, as anyone who’s ever attempted any kind of meditation practice would know, stilling that thought-stream so that reality can filter through is more or less the point of it all. It’s also staggeringly hard to do, a simple task requiring a lifetime of practise. This isn’t a statement that requires much in the way of evidence; try holding any single thought or image in your head for thirty seconds without some other thought wandering in. If you can, you’re a mind ninja, and you can go back to manipulating your cat’s heart rate or whatever mind ninja stuff you spend all day doing. If you’re normal and you can’t, it follows that you’ve probably experienced some suffering at the hands of your own mind. But don’t worry, it’s OK. Saunders is writing for us.
As in his three previous collections of short fiction, the characters in Tenth of December inhabit a you-just-took-all-the-brown-acid nightmare America, a landscape of the gouged-out soul where everyone thrashes in a chemically-altered stew of corporate-speak, commercial mindfuckery, and economic rape, numbed by the exhaustion and terror of wondering if they’ll be the next one spooned into the gibbering mandibles of late-stage capitalism.
The stories scan as surreal, but only until you spend half a second regarding, say, the medieval theme park of “My Chivalric Fiasco” in the light of any actual theme park you’ve been to, wherein you quickly realize that he’s not even turning up the volume; he’s just pointing. In that story, a janitor at said amusement destination is promoted to the position of Pacing Guard in exchange for his silence on the matter of a sexual assault. The role comes with a patented medication, KnightLyfe, which our hero is excited about— nearly all of the invented medications Saunders peppers his stories with are gratefully accepted, and you can sure as hell see why— but which leads him, in a haze of chemical chivalry (we’ve all been there) to out the crime and end up, along with the victim, terminated. It’s the lightest story in the collection, both in tone and mechanics, but its heart is as black as tar.
The riff is expanded in “Escape from Spiderhead,” one of a number of stories from the collection that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Set in a facility where pharmaceutical experiments are conducted on convicted murderers, our reader surrogate, a guy just out of his teens who lost his shit during a fight and killed another kid with a brick, is, along with a handful of other offenders, manipulated with test drugs that variously wrench them in and out of love, inflate their verbal abilities, enhance their perception of nature, and, sickeningly, torture them with floods of unendurable depression.
Both stories work similar ground, dealing with the way the casual dicking of the human mind is accepted as a natural activity of private enterprise, all part of our culture’s cosmic destiny to plant a barcode on literally everything we can apprehend. What Saunders wants to show us, however, runs deeper than the rote violation familiar from everyday life at the feet of our corporate pharaohs. Both stories make literal what is elsewhere in Tenth of December represented as merely de facto, namely the colonization of our inner selves— our dreams, loves, our idiosyncrasies, our preferences, passions, longings— via the Psy-Ops of a parasitic advertising industry whose entire purpose is to spiritually prep us for the strip mining of our consumer potential.
Freaky, right? So when this is the beat we’re all marching to, it can’t come as any surprise that what we get in place of right thought is Saunders’s specialty: internal monologues rendered in a desperate staccato of musings, fantasies, delusions, and anxieties that bombard the characters seemingly both from within and without like the frenzied demands of a worked-up studio audience, informed in equal measure by the twin implanted languages of self-help (“Thank you, Lord… You have given me so much: struggles and the strength to overcome them; grace, and new chances every day to spread that grace around”) and sales (“When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on haybale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps?”) that are alternately hilarious and devastating.
Random House | 272 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0812993806