One of the joys of reading and sharing books is that you’ll sometimes find authors and topics that shift your perspective in profound and even life-changing ways. The flip side is that what one person finds exhilarating or deeply insightful can leave another with more mixed emotions and reactions.

Tenth of December: Stories (2013) by George Saunders is a book of short stories by the widely honored writer and satirist. Readers of his other works will recognize many of the traits found here: “hesitant, disappointed” protagonists where the reader is in their heads; language that is “exhilarating” and full of slang; settings in “self-contained” suburbs or small towns. More than one reviewer notes that Saunders is at his best showing the way that daydreams and fantasies color our thoughts. While Saunders has the skill of a satirist, he also brings in a generosity of spirit for his characters that is appealing. For me, however, it was an uneven collection with a handful of riveting stories that kept the reader engaged and more than one disappointment that had me impatient to get to the end.

I very much enjoyed Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and I hoped to find that same overall level of excellence in this collection. However, out of the ten stories, I found only three that I would want to return to read again. The opening story, Victory Lap, “toggles between the perspective of Alison, a 14-year-old girl with delusions of grandeur . . . Kyle, a teenage dork in love with Alison . . . and an unnamed murderer/rapist who attempts to abduct Alison.” Each is living with fantasies that come to haunt them before Kyle breaks free of his invisible chains to act decisively and with honor. Home sees Mike returning from an unnamed war in the Middle East with PTSD to a place he no longer recognizes. He is alienated, and all he can hear over and over again is “thank you for your service.” As one reviewer notes, it is impossibly moving. Finally, the last story in the collection, which gives the book its name, ends on a hopeful note, giving a dying man the opportunity to recall who he really is. As Gregory Cowles wrote in the New York Times, this story . . .

“is in many respects a companion piece to ‘Victory Lap,’ which opens it. Another dreamy adolescent is lost in fantasy until physical danger intrudes, this time in the form of actual thin ice. The story ends on a hopeful note, as so many of the stories here do—this book, with its cover divided neatly into black and white like a semaphore yin-yang symbol, is at least as interested in human kindness as it is in cruelty.” 

My perspective is just that. Online you can find strong positive reviews as well as reviews that find this work somewhere below Saunders’ best. Tenth of December: Stories made a number of “best books of the year/decade” lists, so perhaps I’ll leave you with the publisher’s final words about what you may find here.

“Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Thin ice photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash