Welcome to the black box

Tenth of December By George Saunders 208 pages Available at Fully Booked

Satirists don’t usually break your heart. There’s Swift with his acid wit, and Mark Twain’s wry ironies, and Kurt Vonnegut’s deadpan prophecies. They all, at one time or another, expose something of the red beating organ inside, but George Saunders can actually break your heart by making you feel you’re part of a larger current of humanity, and he does so yet again in Tenth of December.  

His short stories are not easy to get the first time around. It often takes a rereading or two to understand the structure and syntax and conceit of his stories. But what Saunders touches on does change you in some small way.

The writer himself likens reading short stories — and art in general — to “entering a black box.” This is a term that has been applied to Vonnegut, particularly his novel Slaughterhouse Five. People enter the first page thinking one way about the world, and exit with their perspective changed, unalterably.

Saunders builds black boxes for a living. Small, sturdy boxes, each one containing a brand new view of the world. But over the course of four story collections, he’s come to fashion the contents of his boxes into a very specific message. It’s about the portal between life and death, and how passing through it, or near it, changes our perspective on our world, our lives.

Vonnegut presented much the same message in Slaughterhouse Five, in which Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time,” hurtles from childhood to WWII to adult life to life on the planet Tralfamadore. He concluded that time doesn’t really exist, we are living one eternal existence, and it’s better to focus on the good moments rather than the bad.

The characters in Tenth of December don’t have that luxury. They are stuck in their circumstances. But their/our perception still changes. Whether it’s the parallel characters in “Victory Lap,” one a teenage girl in bloom, the other a would-be Lancelot out to save her from a would-be rapist, or the closing title story, in which a terminal patient seeks abandon in a snowy forest, only to stumble upon redemption, Saunders is almost rapt by the human condition. Think of it as coming upon a deer in the forest: it freezes, you freeze. It doesn’t see you, quite; you marvel at its beauty, its hushed grace. Then, slowly, it gathers its wits and goes along its path. And you go along yours. The author allows us to enter that condition in a number of these stories.

But what about the nuts and bolts? How does he build these boxes? Saunders is a master of modern syntax. He knows how the haves talk, but more importantly, he knows the have-nots. His prose is stitched together in a kind of shorthand, the prose of an office memo recited in one’s own head. His characters’ epiphanies are often stunted, short-circuited. We sneer at them, but also recognize how hard it is to think freely, bravely, independently in this modern world. He’s a great comic writer, much as contemporary David Foster Wallace was, and a skilled satirist.

In Tenth of December, Saunders plays down the sci-fi post-consumerism of previous collections like In Persuasion Nation. There are still bits of future-speak and office-speak, but the overall design is more rural, or suburban, focusing on the widening gap between rich and poor (“Puppy,” “Al Roosten,” “Home,” “The Semplica Girl Diaries”) and a desperate sense of aspiration. Self-improvement is a regular theme, the peculiar self-improvement mantra of Americans. Socioeconomics is part of the thing that breaks your heart in these stories. Most off-the-wall, perhaps, is “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” which concerns a father trying to keep up with the Joneses while paying for a proper birthday party for his daughter. It’s a bizarro alternate world where the haves hire Third World migrants to be strung together via microlines threaded through their skulls; they are paid meager wages to be arranged as hanging lawn décor. This nightmarish scenario actually underlies one of Saunders’ more haunting, visionary tales.

Another recurring theme is rescue, or personal sacrifice. An almost knightly impulse guides the boy in “Victory Lap,” though it leads to personal tragedy; it accidentally infuses a theme park worker in “My Chivalric Fiasco” and guides the “pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms” in the title story. It causes a lab subject to willingly overdose on test medicine to prevent others from needless suffering in “Escape from Spiderhead.”

Saunders teaches Creative Writing at Syracuse University, and his short stories have evolved from wry flights of fantasy (one early story in 2001’s Pastoralia follows a group of people performing as cavemen in a futuristic theme park) to a persistent strain of humanism, one that doesn’t beat you over the head but quietly insists that people matter, that dignity matters. This dignity is harder to maintain during economic downturn, and the writer has said the stories in Tenth of December reflect his observation of modern American life and “the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.” Some critics see a disconnect between Saunders’ intellect and his heart, but the message is pretty clear: you just have to step inside the black box and take a look around.