The awkward child in question, communicating in his reveries with NASA mission control and imagining himself a white knight saving his crush from "the species that lived amongst the old rock wall," sets out across a frozen pond to save a man dying of brain cancer who is trying to commit suicide by freezing to death in the snow. The fantastic enters naturally, as elements of a child's fantasy life (Saunders knows that all children, and many adults, are basically Walter Mitty). The title story might be the best thing Saunders has ever written, and it's completely, heartbreakingly realistic. But his realist-absurdist tropes are deployed in the service of a moral vision that, though present in the earlier stories, now contains 30 percent more pixels per inch. People begin sentences with phrases like "Per Rachel's file." No one's going to mistake Saunders for Alice Munro. Saunders hasn't gone straight - there are MiiVOXMAX tags and MobiPaks™ and the jangled, misinflected vernacular of idiot children of all ages. Instead there is something much more startling: Stories about real people with real problems struggling with real questions about right and wrong - stories as reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty as of Barry Hannah and Thomas Pynchon. Yet lo, there are no talking snack cakes in his latest book, "Tenth of December." There are no snack cakes of any kind.
"Jon," from "In Persuasion Nation," shows Saunders in full-on Baudrillardian-bobble mode:īecause what is her rush, I was feeling, why is she looking so frantic with furrowed anxious brow like that Claymation chicken at LI 98473 who says the sky is falling the sky is falling and turns out it is only a Dodge Ramcharger which crushes her from on high and one arm of hers or wing sticks out with a sign that says March Madness Daze ? The thesis was anything but new, but it's rarely been as hilariously driven home. If I told you that George Saunders' new collection of stories is full of talking snack cakes, you would probably be like, "Oh, good, no one captures the morally ambiguous inflection of the talking snack cake like George Saunders." In "Pastoralia" (2000) and "In Persuasion Nation" (2006), Saunders reconceived the short story as a souped-up electric sheep, channeling the advertising slogans and self-help jargon that define our sensory-overloaded mediascape: reality as the most unreal reality show of all.
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