Tenth of December by George Saunders

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“I can’t think of an author more universally admired in this country than [George]  Saunders,” writes a commenter under this most gently skeptical and eventually repentant piece at The Millions. It’s as if people are somehow wary of criticizing Saunders, presumably because he has inherited the DFW mantle of postmodernist formal inventiveness wed to neo-Victorian sentimental humanism. If we deride him, we deride our own better angels; we let the cynics and the nihilists win. I would like to begin my discussion of Saunders with three mottoes that question this neo-sentimentalism and pursuit of consensus:

Opposition is true friendship.
—Blake

Without contraries, there is no progression.
—Blake

Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.
—Emerson

I read some of Tenth of December with genuine amusement—he can be very funny, especially as a parodist of the way we talk now, a mix of plausibly-deniable passive-aggressive businessese and knowingly sarcastic vernacular shorthand. I also admire Saunders’s skillful and effortless-seeming concision—he’s economical in an age of narrative bloat.

Some of the book, though, I read with impatience. “Escape from Spiderhead” is at once too long and too short, and the central idea of “My Chivalric Fiasco” is puerile. And some I read in a hot fury—the title story, the last in the collection, is simply a sentimental farrago of cheap coincidences and emotional button-pushing all the more insulting for the few psychological insights it undeniably contains. It is a reprehensible polemic, hidden under gallons of schmaltz, against the suicide of the terminally ill; it is a brief, in essence, on behalf of the cruelest tendencies in both the medical apparatus and the Catholic Church, the former abusing materialist concepts and the latter abusing metaphysical concepts, in their unkind insistence that we all stay plugged into the wall forever no matter how utterly, agonizingly vanished is any possibility for eudaemonia.

What did Saunders learn in Catholic school? Not what I found to be its most useful lesson: the humbling realization, as necessary for the non-believer as for the faithful, that humankind cannot be master of the universe or attain perfection on earth. Perhaps the real trouble with this collection is announced after the final story, in the Acknowledgements, when Saunders writes to his children:

…watching you all these years has taught me that goodness is not only possible, it is our natural state.

If he’d written this about, for instance, adult women, or about Native Americans—and such things have very often been said about women and Native Americans—we would recognize it as pernicious. We would say, and I see no reason not to say it when children are in question, that it is simply not ethical, is perhaps even dangerous, to put such an idealization in place of a person. The opposition, whether religious or secular, to this kind of idealism may actually be more merciful to actual human beings, however pessimistic it sounds, than this spurious exaltation of humanity’s natural goodness.

As this review  is a sermon in the doctrine of hatred), I am reminded of Melville’s Captain Delano, from Benito Cereno:

Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano’s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated excitement, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.

This “undistrustful good nature,” for which Saunders is celebrated and for which he publicly celebrates his children, mars stories throughout this collection just as Delano’s nature prevents him from recognizing the evils with which he collaborates and the violence done in resistance to them. There is almost always some swerve in each story away from the very worst—and the very worst must be confronted if you’re going to maintain that humanity is basically good.

Sometimes the evasion is at the level of plot: the first and last stories both arrange the “best” possible outcome for the characters, at least from the implicit moral vantage of the narrative. At other times, the stories escape difficulty by arresting genuine conflict. In “Escape from Spiderhead” the villain is allowed to be so unctuously, bathetically malign, so unpersuasive, so villainous in his conversations with the hero, that the story merely flatters the reader’s own humanist prejudices by inviting us to cheer on the hero’s redemptive exertions against the big bad corporation and its reductive invocations of science. It would be utterly devastating to this story to compare it with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, given that novel’s far more chastened, thus actually more instructive, depiction of the individual’s dampened agency when faced with structural violence.

“The Semplica Girl Diaries” is on the other hand well done in its claustrophobically convincing portrayal of how good intentions led inexorably to evil outcomes. But even this story pulls up before it confronts the worst. For one thing, the titular conceit is too fancifully grotesque to allow its ideological justification, as voiced in the story, any real plausibility. For another, the motive of the narrator’s daughter in precipitating the narrative’s crisis is carefully kept free of any taint, any moral impurity—even though it seems to me that any normal child, however concerned he or she might be with justice, would almost certainly also act out of envy for the spoiled older sister. Saunders’s manipulation of motive makes the story nearly resemble a comforting fable, however unhappy its implied conclusion may be—and that ending is, in any case, left to the reader’s imagination, where it might still turn out all right. No matter how bad things get, we know that someone, preferably a child, is the bearer of our natural goodness, even if that goodness can’t yet find a home in our unnatural world.

There is a killing lack of struggle and tension in Tenth of December, a very American sense of innocence. The ideals that inform this innocence are defeated at the level of plot in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” but they are undamaged at the level of theme, because they are subjected only to contingency and never to substantial counter-argument, such as would be introduced by the daughter’s mixed rather than purely moral motivation for freeing the Semplica girls.

Saunders bars any possibility that a convincing critique of humanism, whether it comes from the left or the right, from reason or from religion, might enter most of his stories. He allows little chance for the reader to come away from this book with the “wrong idea,” as so many readers have come away with the wrong idea (i.e., the opposite of what the writer intends) from Don Quixote or Paradise Lost or Wuthering Heights or The Brothers Karamazov or the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

But there are two stories here that I unreservedly admire, and, perhaps not coincidentally, they are stories that have little recourse to fantasy: “Puppy” and “Home,” especially the latter. Each is brilliant at evoking the attenuated character of what remains of the U.S. middle classes, stretching, often enough in one family, from the degraded petty bourgeoisie, one step up from outright poverty, to the haughty upper bourgeoisie, with its property and its money and its status-signaling charity.

In these stories, mostly free of the convoluted and facetious science-fictional conceits of the others, Saunders seems to attain true negative capability. He is remorseless in his depiction of both the well-off characters and the poor ones, a truly fiery-hearted but cold-eyed observer of the imperialist self-righteousness of the New–Yorker-subscriber type as well as of their debt-ridden poor relations’ resentful squalor. Here is a genuine critique of humanism’s enabling condition of property and wealth, alongside a brave refusal to celebrate, in academic fashion, the lower class’s deprivation as “difference.” In these stories, all the more moving and hilarious for the author’s own restraint, Saunders seems to have forgotten to try to persuade us that humans are basically good, to persuade us of anything at all. And that is how good fiction is written.