A Review: Tenth of December
Title of Work: Tenth of December
Author: George Saunders
Format:
Published: 2013
Started:
Finished: 2022-10-16\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5
Man, I felt so much more than I anticipated here… Saunders took significant liberties with form, stripping some of these stories down to the shorthand one might find in diary entries written late at night following the grinding down of a long days’ work and the emotional taxation of keeping life together at home. There isn’t time for flowery prose but a desire remains to capture for progeny feelings about this life that shoves past quickly, the only chance to claw back some autonomy from a world that seems to scoop us up and move us where it pleases before we can toddle away. It’s not like we really have any say in the matter but this way we can claim some of the experience for our own. Write it down and fantasize that someone might discover it one day, dusting it off and saying, “Hey, this guy really was going through it wasn’t he?” Well, I felt it all. The joy and nervousness of new lust and desire. The gut gripping sadness of disappointing your daughter on her birthday. The frantic anxiety of impending reputational ruin. The fear and helplessness in being forced against your will into the world of grownups when all you really wanted to do was keep playing for a while longer in the stream that passes through the woods behind your house. So many of my highlights in this one were moments of wonder at phrasing I’d never quite seen before or a unique piece of protagonistic internal dialogue or a silly little made up word that reminded me of my own family’s lingo. Consider me convinced—Saunders sits squarely among the greats of our time.
P.S. Just an aside but the version I read included an afterword “Conversation Between George Saunders and David Sedaris” which I found to be exceptionally pleasant considering I had just been listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day and Carnival of Snackery from DS while reading Tenth of December. These were my first significant exposures to both writers and I grew enamored with the styles of each independently. Seeing them chatting about writer stuff and cracking jokes when I had never expected to find them together felt awfully synchronous. In response to some DS question about fiction’s role in the class issues of America, GS even included a wonderful Faulkner quote, another great writer with at least two works imminently looming near the top of my “to read” list. Strange coincidences in a strange but ever entertaining literary world.