By James Hoff

Tenth of December is George Saunders’ fourth collection of short stories, and it is perhaps his darkest. It is certainly his most trenchant. Like In Persuasion Nation, published in 2006, Tenth of December offers an always sharp-witted but deeply emotional critique of twenty-first century America. However, while Saunders’ previous collections have tended to focus on the perils of consumerism and technology, frequently examining the unnervingly and increasingly fine line between self and product, the stories in this collection are much more concerned with the emotionally and psychologically destructive social concepts of money, class, and status.

Like a Steinbeck novel on Mescaline, the stories in Tenth of December craft, with deep pathos and psychological depth, the debilitating effects of inequality and precarity, offering a stark and characteristically grotesque portrait of the human casualties of an economy gone wild. Towards this end Tenth of December offers up a menagerie of misfits, failures, and working class losers all trying just to make it through another miserable day. Harried mothers, desperate fathers, shell-shocked vets, failing business owners, dementia-riddled old men, and narco-rehabilitated bad-luck murderers populate the cluttered interiors and suburban and sub-rural landscapes of Saunder’s America, where ghoulish “hobos” stand around with signs that read “PLEASE HELP HOMLESS”—“hey sorry you lost your hom!”—and young boys named Bo are chained like dogs to backyard trees because their medication makes them grind their teeth. Again and again Saunders gets us inside the heads of these characters, often moving back and forth between members of different classes, and in the most pedestrian language possible, lets us eavesdrop on their wants and worries.

And Tenth of December is pervaded with worry! Characters fret about how to pay their bills, they obsess about their children’s futures, they sweat their ill-health and old-age, they mourn their deteriorating beauty, and they struggle with their own deep resentments and their barely contained desires to do violence to those whom they believe have harmed them in some real or imagined way. But mostly these characters just end up hurting themselves. Unable to articulate or name the real source of their unhappiness, and unable, anyways, to do anything about it, they trudge along, dreaming of fitter, happier, brighter lives, adoring spouses, European vacations, healthy, grateful children, and well-deserved promotions up the ladder of success. As one character puts it, trying to rationalize the sense of inferiority he feels in the face of other people’s wealth and happiness: I “am not tired of work. It is a privilege to work. I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich myself.” Such declarations feel like they could have been drawn straight from the mouths of some right wing Fox pundit, and indeed, many of the characters of these stories resemble your typical Fox viewer. In language as simple as an eighth grade book report, Saunders artfully renders the mental detritus of his characters’ conservative thoughts, but without a trace of condescension. Saunders’ characters are without a doubt deeply flawed, profoundly credulous, and wholly interpolated into capitalist consumer culture, yet time and again we feel a close kinship with them, a kinship of shared helplessness and suffering.

Nowhere is this sense of kinship and mutual suffering more deeply manifest, perhaps, than in the main character of “Home.” Mike is a US soldier who has just come back from the Middle East to find his wife and children living with another, much wealthier, and seemingly psychologically healthier, man. Raised poor, and freshly returned from a war most Americans have already forgotten about, Mike’s resentment finds outlet in his continual criticisms of his former wife and family. Not surprisingly, these criticisms have much to do with the incredible inequality he sees around him upon his return. While his mother is evicted from her home, his former wife seems to be doing just fine, living in a big home with three cars in the driveway.

“Three cars for two grown-ups, I thought. What a country. What a couple of selfish dicks my wife and her new husband were. I could see that, over the years, my babies would slowly transform into selfish-dick babies, then selfish-dick toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults, with me all that time, skulking around like some unclean suspect uncle.”

As Charles Bukowski eloquently put it in Barfly, “nobody suffers like the poor,” and Saunders seems keenly aware of that dictum in this collection. In fact, “Home” offers a startling metaphor (a kind of objective correlative for the entire collection) of the ways in which the poor themselves are manipulated to bring suffering upon others. As Mike plans his revenge against his wife and her new husband he thinks back upon a time in high school “when this guy paid me to clean some gunk out of his pond.”

“You snagged the gunk with a rake, then rake-hurled it. At one point, the top of my rake flew into the gunk pile. When I went to retrieve it, there were like a million tadpoles, dead and dying…their tender white underbellies had been torn open by the gunk suddenly crashing down on them from on high…I tried to save a few, but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse….

It was like, either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.”

In his typical fashion, Saunders takes a seemingly mundane recollection or observation, and draws deep wisdom from it. Indeed, this story of senseless destruction and learned indifference haunts the collection and provides a potent image of the connections between the military war in Iraq and the economic war at home, which grinds up and tosses away the budding tadpoles of human potential.

In this respect Saunders’ characters in Tenth of December resemble those of the great Nathaniel West or Raymond Carver: these are ordinary folks whose lives have come undone for reasons seemingly beyond their control. Whether it’s the inferiority-fueled violence of the inept but ruthless rapist in “Victory Lap,”—continually hampered and hectored by the abusive words of his dead step-father—or the shame and status-driven mistakes of Saunders’ latest everyman in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” who bungles away his lottery winnings on an ill-conceived—and grotesquely inhumane—birthday present for his young daughter, Saunders’ captures the continual folly, disappointment, and banal brutality of contemporary capitalism. And although the depressing world that Saunders paints for us can sometimes feel an awful lot like the last scene of Day of the Locust, in which a crowd of celebrity hounds bursts into self-destructive riot, it is also, contra West, a place of redemption and grace.

Indeed, rather than West or Carver, it is perhaps to Flannery O’Connor that Saunders owes the greatest debt, for, as with the best of O’Connor’s short stories, misfortune and sorrow are always a step away from salvation, and many of the stories in Tenth of December, though morbidly, sometimes hilariously, fixated upon the humiliations of and alienations of life under capitalism, end with a kind of unexpected flash of realization or triumph. In “Victory Lap,” for instance, the “bean-pole kid,” Kyle Boot, whose every action and every thought is tightly controlled by his domineering, but seemingly well-intentioned, parents, manages to transcend that rigid adherence to rule and authority only by beating to near death the man who tries to abduct, and who plans to brutally rape, his high school crush and neighbor. Saunders describes young Kyle, Perhaps the only traditional “hero” of the collection, sprinting across the forbidden yard, barefoot and shirtless, in the throes of a kind of epiphany—“oh God, suddenly he saw what this giddy part of himself intended, which was to violate a directive so Major and absolute that it wasn’t even a directive.” Likewise, the mother of the mawkishly titled story “Puppy,” who seems to be living on the edge of subsistence, has a kind of visionary realization at the end of her long day’s suffering, that “love was liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better.” What would be considered pablum from any other writer, rings as true here as any more eloquent observation on human nature by Emma Bovary or Isabel Archer.

Unlike O’Connor, however, who one feels is driven by a deep—perhaps deeply Catholic—disappointment in humanity, Saunders is guided more by the Buddhist call to deeply feel and understand the suffering of others. Whereas O’Connor’s temporary moments of grace are almost inevitably the result of an engagement with evil, Saunders’ characters experience redemption mostly through their suffering.  Take for example, Jeff, the protagonist of “Escape from Spiderhead.” Like the eponymous Jon, from Saunders’ earlier story of the same name, whose sole experience of life is as a kind of captive product tester for young teens, Jeff also lives a life of altered reality and confinement. Forced by court order to live in a laboratory in order to avoid prison, Jeff is subjected to a series of experiments involving mood altering drugs with trademarked names such as VerbaluceTM (which allows one to speak as eloquently as a young Will Shakespeare), VivistifTM (which, you guessed it, allows men to experience rock-hard erections indefinitely), and DarkenfloxxTM (which sends the subjects into a deep state of despair and inevitable suicide—the only way out of Spiderhead). Jeff’s escape comes only after he refuses to administer DarkenfloxxTM to one of the other inmates at spiderhead, and decides to take it himself instead. After smashing his head against the corner of the desk to escape the immense suffering caused by the drug, Jeff’ spirit slowly rises above the lab.

“From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.”

This romantic sense of unity, this nirvana-like state of connection and its subsequent absence from ordinary life, is a recurring theme of much of the collection and therefore this moment, which might otherwise feel schmaltzy or over-wrought, becomes truly profound. How, Saunders seems to ask, might such a sense of connection and meaning be achieved in real life?

“Tenth of December,” the eponymous, final, and easily most successful story of the collection, offers a tentative response to this question as well as a much needed and intensely moving antidote to the relentless hopelessness of stories like “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Home.” Here, finally, we find a story of connection, cooperation, and acceptance. The story traces the paths of two protagonists: a pale young boy, “with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs” out for a day of battle against the imaginary forces of evil he’s contrived to destroy, and Don Eber, a middle aged man with a “brown spot” on his brain who is intent on ending his life before things get worse by simply laying down in the bitter cold and drifting off. These plans are cut short however, when the young boy tries to return Eber’s discarded jacket, and in the process falls through the ice on the frozen pond. Forced to respond to the needs of another, Eber is drawn out of his own misery and back into the world. Safe in the young boy’s house, Eber looks around and reflects upon his earlier decision.

“What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn’t died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn’t dead. He’d killed no one. Ha! Somehow he’d got it all back”

Once again, to have not killed, to have lived and not caused suffering, to have put aside one’s own desires or needs for another, is to achieve at least some kind of peace, however temporary it might be.

Although the characters of Tenth of December may not understand their alienation—though too often they think of their suffering as something natural and inevitable—we do understand. We, the readers, get it, and end up feeling a strong sense of camaraderie and empathy with these characters, whom we wish to reach out and help. It is the construction of this deep sense of compassion that is, and always has been, Saunders’ real genius.  The difference this time around, perhaps is that we are much more like these characters than we might ourselves be willing to admit.