george saunders

Anyway: I dunno if it's a story of a woman "going to pieces," since the whole point of it lies in the opposite surface impression -- that she comes back collected, functional, no-nonsense, and full of plans. She also comes back a monster. So I don't know if "to pieces" is a very good way of putting it: she's more of an exaggerated shade of the uncle (or stepfather?), whose success seems to have come at the expense of something that the narrator would prefer to hold on to. A lot of Saunders' stories are very similar, but there's actually a level on which I like seeing him work with that consistency of concern: "Sea Oak," like everything else, becomes about what exactly it would mean "becoming" to get ahead, how much needs to be sacrificed to accomplish it, and whether the steps required to accomplish it are the right way to situate one's mind at all.

And the thing that separates Saunders from how most of yr Woods-style hysterical-realists on this is where he comes down on that, and how naturally -- the guy does try to accomplish it, somewhat sadly, and somewhat because he can't explain to the ghost why life isn't fair (and maybe doesn't want to have to not-explain the same thing to his nephews).

Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

Which is not bad as a genre for a critic to identify, but there are times when his stern disapproval of the thing amounts to saying "god damn it, these young writers are trying to be funny and entertaining and take childish delight in the very acts of writing and reading," which I'm not sure is really the most productive way to criticize that stuff; one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing, some feeling of joy and freedom in the acts of reading and writing themselves -- not terrible things to introduce into literature right now.

Plus it bleeds over into going "oh, whatever, hysterical realism" every time someone tries to do anything fun at all -- Saunders is a pretty focused (even samey!) short-story writer, not a scattered hysteric, but he brings one old lady back from the dead and it's all "yeah, hysterics."

(There remains a slight generational "thing" around that, actually, one that I never see older people acknowledge. Wallace had something interesting about that in his television essay, from, what, fifteen years ago? And still I'll see older people advise writing techniques such as introducing every character with an overview of appearance, to which some younger people invariably react badly: "If we cared what everyone looked like we'd be in the film program!")

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):

show your cock, sleek metal hole, lime crone, pink crone, attitudinal difficulties, bag from the bottom, heavy girl, your oatmeal, small bugs

I think Nab. sounds a bit daft saying: "one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing". He sounds a bit like (heaven help me)... Dave Marsh. I don't think Wood is stern, particularly. He is an aesthete, with a limited patience for sociology/cultural theory/pomo posturing. To put it bluntly, he wants novels about people rather than novels about ideas. As such, he is a timely response to the over-rating of DFW in the US and, especially, Rushdie in the UK.

Funnily enough, Wood is younger than many of the HRers he criticises.

Zadie Smith has recently accepted Wood's criticism of her (though she defends Wallace against him) and seems to be moving towards a less "inventive" style, thank goodness.

Wood is no great fan of suburban realism - he has criticised Updike, and he likes Hamsun and Hrabal - but he dislikes the cartoonish element in serious fiction. For example, he criticises Smith for writing in places like Tom Sharpe:( '"Mickey . . .prised Samad's face off the hot glass with an egg slice." This kind of writing is closer to the 'low' comic style of a farceur like Tom Sharpe than it ought to be. It has a pertness, but it squanders itself in a mixture of banality and crudity.')

For me, the same tendency weakens Saunders. He is a gifted writer of sentences, but sometimes his sharpness cuts against itself: so, for me, parts of "Sea Oak" read two-dimensionally, and that interferes with my belief.

Anyway, I hadn't heard of this guy before this thread, and I went from being interested to being not so interested in him. I suppose I wouldn't kick him out of bed, at least not at first.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200310/article_moffett.php

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=5610

Being about systems and ideas is one field where books have the advantage over film. But when it comes to whimsy, the book/film connection seems to be something else: the literary novel is officially Not Important Anymore. There's something so half-ridiculous about the fact of even writing one that it's easy to see where the whimsy comes in: what the hell, it's your novel, people hardly even read books anymore, might as well have fun with it. The problem here isn't whimsy, or "books about ideas" versus "books about people," but the fact that neither of those categories usually packs the ambition to say something grand and far-reaching and real.

Still, though, I'm sensitive to seeing someone congratulate a writer for being "less 'inventive'," despite the scare quotes. Why? Because I don't trust the way things are written off as whimsy or wacky when they very often mean something completely unwhimsical, both to writer and reader. Since this is a Saunders thread, "Sea Oak" again -- it has the tone that many would call whimsical, but I can't sort out a single element in it that doesn't seem focused and meaningful and directly relevant to something serious (and serious-minded) to say about people. So I sometimes read charges about "hysterical-realist" books as being like charges about "pretentious" bands -- sometimes they're spot-on, but all too often they're a way of dismissing some perception of "style" without even bothering to notice that it's actually genuine substance.

Naturally, I'm in favour of inventiveness that's natural and creative; but zaniness for the sake of it - like the talking turd in Frantzen, or the talking lawnmower in a story by Frances gapper that I read recently, or the relentless counter-realities in Eggars's flash fiction - strikes me as too easy. The hardest thing is to extrapolate from the real into something original, not to be original by sidestepping the real. I'm not against all surreal flights of fancy - I liked Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker", for example - but I admit I prefer the writers who avoid it, for example Tobias Wolfe. I don't want to get polarised about this (I do like Saunders, and occasionally love him), but I'm uneasy about the relentless infiltration of fantasy tropes into literary fiction. (I'm just one of those people: as soon as a ghost, a miraculous occurrence, a post-modern conjuring trick, a metatextual irony, appears in a story, my heart sinks.)

(a) Isn't that stuff partly the result of the film era and the Coover dictum -- i.e., you should write stuff that can only be written? (I think this is an idiotic dictum, for the record, but I do understand why modern-day writing would select for people interested in only-in-fiction tricks.) But then more importantly:

(b) Can you defend this "relentless infiltration" line? Like I said, it's certainly a trend, and it's one associated with the highest-profile young writers today. But it's also a "trend" in the opposite sense -- it's a limited cadre. I mean, can we get past just saying "relentless" and "everywhere" and actually justify this idea that "everyone" is doing it? Because so far as I can see the bulk of fiction, high-lit and low-lit, remains as traditional as ever.

I think it might be even harder to sidestep the real and make it work for an audience who are only familiar with the real.

(And since "making it work" is a writer's job and not "keeping it real"...)

and hardly anyone would say that cream soda thing like that.

A bit more than "similar" IMO. I thought it was rotten. I liked that one page story called "pole" though.

Have enjoyed most of his work, but 400p is not the length at which i want to read it.

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Leomon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.

D'oh! The Lemon Grove, of course. I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

I read CivilWarLand when the paperback came out in the mid-90s, when it was a good bridge between the sci-fi I read as a teenager and the Proper Literature I pretended to like in my twenties. Anyway, it's amazing (or so I remember) but the shtick probably doesn't come across as original as it seemed at the time, if only because it's been imitated so often (especially by Saunders).

That Lemon Grove thing seemed fun in the excerpt on Amazon.

I've only read 10th of December but found it fantastic, especially The Semplica-Girl Diaries which can be read online http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-semplica-girl-diaries

should probably read his older stuff

The NYorker has a ton of Saunders stuff avail to read

Lincoln in the Bardo was an inspiring read. Can't think of another contemporary American author with such an impressive grasp of language and style. It's both straightforward and experimental, postmodern and touching, even spiritual. I'm going to check out his early work when I get the chance.

Oh yeah, and of course it's very funny too.

The cacophony of voices and styles is elegantly integrated with the themes and narrative, really just a very clever way of telling the story, surprisingly easy to follow.

I've heard so-so things about it but you've just convinced me to give it a shot

Great! I'm not sure I'd want to argue that it's perfect in every way, but I def think it's an enjoyable read all the way - and even though it's labeled as a novel, it's really more written in the style of a drama which means you read it in no time

this story is very lovely!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/21/george-saunders-fox-8-short-story-man-booker-prize-lincoln-bardo

oh yeah, and he won the Booker Prize.

did anyone other than niels on here read lincoln in the bardo? i picked it up the other day and there is no way in hell i could read that book. that looked like the kind of book that people buy and then never finish but maybe i'm just dumb.

Same. I’ve read his other stuff but could only make it through the beginning

i read it and loved it, but i could totally see picking it up and not finishing it.

i like his style a lot but, like carver, he's spawned a lot of imitators, and his style has some limits.

his turns toward the sentimental can be heartbreaking and also veer toward sap

I liked it a lot, but it took a minute to get going iirc.

you aren't alone, scott. I got about halfway through it and realized I had no desire to continue down that path. It felt like a song stuck on repeat.

it does take a minute to get going, and to figure out that most of the characters are talking to themselves and not really responding to other characters. it's a series of overlapping narratives, which makes sense from a writer of short stories.

I mean, it is about purgatory.

xp

I listened to the full cast audiobook. I think that's the way to get it done. Although, I will say that our book club (we are all Saunders fans) liked it in any format.

xp - Not quite purgatory. That's where one expiates one's sins in order to become purified and ascend to heaven, but the bardo, where regrets and desires keep one tethered to a past life, unable to move on to the next. So the bardo is a fruitless stasis. That makes for a tough challenge in terms of narrative and Saunders means of handling that challenge bogged down too much to repay me for the effort of finishing it.

His mix of gleeful cruelty and sappy sentimentality sets my teeth on edge. Liked the first couple of collections but it's been diminishing returns since then.

i finished L in the B, it did seem like a short story idea stretched out to novel length. Some of it was quite moving, some of it struck me as emotionally manipulative, either way it didn't make me want to read anything more by him.

i had never read any Saunders until Lincoln in the Bardo & i really loved it, i found it very moving.