Tenth of December

George Saunders


George Saunders has published over twenty short stories and numerous Shouts & Murmurs in The New Yorker since first appearing in the magazine, in 1992. His work includes the short-story collections “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award), “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation” (a finalist for the Story Prize), “Tenth of December” (a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the Folio Prize), and, most recently, “Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness,” a transcript of his 2013 convocation address at Syracuse University, where he teaches. Saunders has won prizes for his best-selling children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” and for a book of essays entitled “The Braindead Megaphone,” and he has been featured in the “O. Henry Prize Stories,” “Best American Short Stories,” “Best American Nonrequired Reading,” “Best American Travel Writing,” and “Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy” anthologies. Named by The New Yorker one of the best American writers under the age of forty in 1999, Saunders has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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Tenth of December

Probably the strongest story in this collection is the one it’s named after: “Tenth of December.”  A little boy with an overactive imagination falls into a frozen pond while trying to return a coat to a sick-looking man.  Thing is, the sick man is there to commit suicide, to try to save himself and his family from his slow awful death.  Now he has to go save the kid, and ends up feeling better about things and decides not to kill himself.  The story is told by switching between the boy’s and man’s perspectives.  We learn about these characters in pieces, finally finding out what drives them.  And watching these strangers interact, first the boy trying to save the man, then the man trying to save the boy, is just so lovely.  It’s one of those stories that risks sentimentality and it pulls it off nicely. 

Sticks

This is my favorite.  It’s the shortest, but for me it has the most impact out of the entire collection.  It’s so lean! No word is wasted.  And you know how I feel about super short stories.  So maybe I’m a little biased.  But it just pulls all the right moves right when it needs to.  So much control! Ah!  I hope Wolff was proud of him for this story.  I think that the passage of time is something very interesting in this story, because it spans nearly a whole lifetime in under two pages, and it does that by focusing on one aspect of this family’s life and through that one small thing, we learn so much about every character in ways that shouldn’t be possible. 

Al Roosten

The weakest story in this collection is “Al Roosten.”  It’s not even that it was necessarily bad, but after finishing the collection I forgot all about it.  When I recreated the table of contents I had to look back into the book to see what it was.  That is why it’s a bad story.  There is nothing worse than being unmemorable.   Why don’t I remember it?  Well, for one thing the plot’s a little boring.  But the big moment in it is that Al does a really shitty, life-changing thing to a guy who just makes him feel jealous, and that’s pretty big.  But I think that what makes this story bad is kind of like how the main character in "Debarking" is a bad character?  I can't really put words to this feeling.  I feel like they’re similar types of people and I am not drawn to either of them. 

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