On Tenth of December

Tenth of December is a stunning achievement. I’ve come to think that if everyone read a George Saunders story a day, the world would be a far better place. The stories are full of children and families living in a world steeped in classic Americana — though sometimes starkly twisted and dystopian, as in “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — and many turn on moral ambiguity, on characters trying their best to be good. In the opening story, “Victory Lap,” the two leads are a naïve young girl who sees the world as a safe, happy place and a young boy hemmed in by his own family’s rules; he breaks those rules to save the girl’s life, and he’s the better for it. The closing story, “Tenth of December,” does similar work, pairing a boy who lives in a fantastical inner world with a middle-aged man dying of terminal cancer. On a freezing day the man sets out to freeze himself to death on a hill, but the boy spots him without his coat, and in trying to save him the boy falls through the ice of a lake and nearly drowns — at which point the man finds a new lease on life: he matters, he isn’t a burden, and a small act can make an enormous difference to someone else.

These themes run through nearly all of Saunders’s stories: people trying to do small things that help others. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” the protagonist chooses to suffer, and ultimately to take his own life, to save other people, even ones who’ve committed heinous crimes. His work is a celebration of human goodness and an affirmation that we, too, can make a difference. But Saunders also knows morality is complicated, that good acts can have devastating consequences and that we have to decide whether we’ll accept them. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” a family straining to keep up with the neighbors gets a windfall when the father wins the lottery and invests in “semplica girls” — women who sold themselves out of desperate situations and now serve as decorative lawn furniture — and when one of the daughters frees them, she throws the family into a debt crisis even as she, in her naïveté, saves their lives. “My Chivalric Fiasco” follows a young man who witnesses his colleague raped by their boss; the boss buys their silence with promotions, and the woman would rather accept it, but the young man takes a potion that compels him to act like a chivalric knight, publicly accuses the boss to defend her honor, and is beaten and fired for it — leaving her horrified, since in their tiny town her husband will be devastated. He acts admirably, and the consequences are severe.

For all the seriousness, the writing is captivating. Saunders fuses literary prose with everyday millennial humor, shifting between the lofty and the way we actually talk, which makes the book profoundly funny. From “My Chivalric Fiasco”:

‘Twas true: Gossip & Slander did indeed Fly like the Wind in our Town, and would, for sure, reach the Ear of poor dumbfuck Nate soon withal. And finding himself thus cruelly inform’d of the Foul Violation of his Martha, Nate would definitely freak. Oh, man. What a shit day.

He uses different characters to build drastically different linguistic worlds, and the collisions are incredible — uplifting, energetic, refusing to be bound by old conventions. And it isn’t mere rebellion: the man can write a sentence. Altogether, Tenth of December holds some of the finest contemporary short stories there are, and it’s the place to go for anyone curious about what modern literature can do.