George Saunders Thread

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A_B
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George Saunders Thread

Post by A_B »

Spurred by the George Saunders discussion in another thread.

First, what I'm reading:

Fahrenheit 451 - one of the classics I just never got around to back in the day. About halfway through, and enjoying it so far. It's always cool to see what these writers dreamed up that became reality eventually. That said, so far this book seems like a writer justifying the goodness of books. I knew the general themes involved, but try not to read too much about books I haven't read. that way when I finish I get to look up some good critiques and compare them to my own impressions.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland - Patton Oswalt is a damn good writer. It's disjointed by design, a memoir if you will, but the section I am in now about the title basically, is very well written and pretty thought provoking. Love his standup, and this book is no disappointment.

Now, to Saunders. I have only read the Tenth of December collection which just came out. But he his clearly a tremendously talented writer who has a unique style. At first I was afraid that it was going to be Dave Eggers-esque navel gazing (I have a bad tendency to view writers who have been published in the New Yorker as too avant garde) - "ooh look how talented I am" - but within two stories I realized it wasn't anything like that and I felt bad for having that trepidation to begin with. What really took me (and this was mentioned to me by the person who recommended the book in the first place and I hadn't been able to put my finger on what I liked) was what Saunders says by not saying anything.

The short story is a difficult medium. You can't get bogged down in the details, and so instead of telling us the whys of how things got where they are, Saunders simply tells us how people are reacting to how things are. The reader is left to develop his/her own ideas about how things got to the point where the story is taking place. The best example of this is probably "The Semplica Girls Diaries" which has lent itself to bapo's new username.

It's got some weird elements (without giving spoilers, the Semplica Girls are basically lawn ornaments) but Saunders doesn;t worry with they hows so much as the whys. We learn why the Semplica Girls exist (from their own as well as the persepctive of others in the story) but we don't learn how this happened explicitly. And that works. While it is clearly in the future, and things have changed in society to a disturbing degree, some things that are disturbing today clearly display their permanence.

Last thought - Saunders has some daddy issues. 4-5 of the stories mention the absence or mistreatment by father figures.
Last edited by A_B on Wed Mar 13, 2013 11:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Permanent Reading Thread - March 2013

Post by Test Ride the Sybian »

Started Render Unto Rome today. Figured the unveiling of the new Pope was a good time to begin to renew my hatred of the Church. It isn't taking long to get me going. I can't believe working class people give this organization a dime of their money.

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Re: Permanent Reading Thread - March 2013

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AB The White, would it be possible to do me and George Saunders a huge favor and change the thread title? (Can we do that here?) I've been really into Saunders lately, and I was going to start my own thread about him at some point. I don't want him to get lost in a big general thread like this. Could this be just a Saunders thread?
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Re: Permanent Reading Thread - March 2013

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Semplica Girls wrote:AB The White, would it be possible to do me and George Saunders a huge favor and change the thread title? (Can we do that here?) I've been really into Saunders lately, and I was going to start my own thread about him at some point. I don't want him to get lost in a big general thread like this. Could this be just a Saunders thread?
Why not.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

Post by temporassy »

Nice threadjack Syb. You fucking asshole, don't you know George needs this?
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Re: George Saunders Thread

Post by bapo! »

Syb is just the worst.

Thanks, AB. I didn't want to be pushy, but if you and I and hopefully a few others are actually going to talk about the guy, I figure he deserves his own thread. Now we just need more Swampers to go out and buy the book and post here.

I had never read Saunders until recently. Not sure why. He's a favorite of all of my favorites, so I probably should have read him years ago. Then again, Gaddis and Pynchon have also influenced the guys I like, and I can't read them. The New York Times Magazine ran a feature titled 'George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You Will Read This Year.' I thought that was rather presumptuous, but I'm a big fan of declarative statements, so I decided that it was time to dive in.

Really enjoyed all of the stories, but 'Semplica-Girl Diaries' is the story that hooked me for life. A lot of these stories have been published in The New Yorker, as you mentioned, but they're not identical to the book versions. A funny bit from 'Semplica' was excised from the New Yorker version, so I'll post it below.

I've read some stuff about Saunders' (very good) relationship with his editor, which jumps out at me because I just went thru a Raymond Carver phase a few months ago. Carver had an exceedingly complicated relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. Funny that Saunders teaches a course about Carver at Syracuse. (Another tangent. Early in Haruki Murakami's career, he and Carver became friends. The jumping off point of '1Q84' involves an editor doing whatever he wanted with a writer's story. Murakami has probably wanted to write about that for 20 years.)



from 'Semplica-Girl Diaries':
Discouraging, I felt. Because 1) Why does young girl of twelve want such old-lady gift, and 2) Where does girl of twelve get idea that $300 = appropriate amount for b-day gift? For us it was one shirt, one shirt we didn’t want, usually homemade. Once got basketball but was overly bouncy ABA type, red, white, and blue, with, for some reason, drawing of clown on it. When bounced, went like two feet higher than normal ball. Friends called it my “bouncy ball.” Needless to say, did not cost three hundred. Believe Mom got with soap coupons. Gave to me wrapped in homemade shirt with one long arm hanging down. Then urged me to don long-armed shirt, go out, “show guys.” Took photo of me trying to dribble bouncy ball as friend Al held out long arm of shirt, as if to say: Wow, what long arm. In photo, ball bouncing up out of frame. Bottom curve of ball just visible, like moon, Chris M. looking up at ball/moon, amazed/flinching.


AB, I know that you didn't care for 'Al Roosten,' but I thought that this was great:
Larry Donfrey of Larry Donfrey Realty stood nearby in a swimsuit. Donfrey was a good guy. Good but flawed. Not that bright. Always tan. Was Donfrey attractive? Cute? Would the bidders consider Donfrey cuter than him, Al Roosten? Oh, how should he know? Did he like guys? Was he some kind of expert judge on the cuteness of guys?

No, he didn’t like guys and never had.

There had been that period in junior high, yes, when he had been somewhat worried that he might perhaps like guys, and had constantly lost in wrestling because, instead of concentrating on his holds he was always mentally assessing whether his thing was hurting inside his cup because he was popping a mild pre-bone or because the tip was sticking out an airhole, and once he was almost sure he’d popped a mild pre-bone when he found his face pressed against Tom Reed’s hard abs, which smelled of coconut, but, after practice, obsessing about this in the woods, he realized that he sometimes popped a similar mild pre-bone when the cat sat on his groin in a beam of sun, which proved he didn’t have sexual feelings for Tom Reed, since he knew for sure he didn’t have sexual feelings for the cat, since he’d never even heard that described as being possible. And from that day on, whenever he found himself wondering whether he liked guys, he always remembered walking exultantly in the woods after the liberating realization that he was no more attracted to guys than to cats, just happily kicking the tops off mushrooms in a spirit of tremendous relief.

A sort of music started up, consisting of a series of loud, thick bumps punctuated by a smattering of feminine groans and something that sounded like a squeaky door, and Larry Donfrey headed down the runway to sudden cheers and whoops.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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If I had it to do over, I would have read one story, took a couple of days off, then started the next. Starting "Al Roosten" directly after "Exhortation" made them run together a bit.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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i thought you meant this guy.

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(nevermind)
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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AB_skin_test wrote:If I had it to do over, I would have read one story, took a couple of days off, then started the next. Starting "Al Roosten" directly after "Exhortation" made them run together a bit.
I had that problem with his first book. There's a sameness to a lot of the stories, so they kind of blended together after a while. But it's a first book, written while he was supposed to be working an office job, so it's not going to be perfect.

There's a level of absurdity that runs thru a lot of his work. (It's easy to see why he and David Foster Wallace were fans of each other's work -- and probably copied each other, to some degree.) That's present in 'CivilWarLand In Bad Decline,' and the humor is there, but I didn't get much more than that out of it.

'Pastoralia,' his second book, is a big jump, I think. I'm about halfway thru 'In Persuasion Nation.' There are definitely signs of greatness in these books. There's a way he has of using a specific detail, just a mention, not over-written, that makes a situation seem somehow more stark. And there's a weird push/pull between humor and pathos. It's a tricky balance, but I think he pulls it off. This is the kind of stuff that plays on my nerve endings.

Somebody told me a couple of weeks ago that 'Tenth of December' was #1 on the New York Times' best-seller list. That really surprised me. I didn't know that people were still reading this kind of stuff in big numbers. (Or is there a separate list for literary fiction, aside from general fiction?)
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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You're probably about to get really angry with me..but I think Saunders is Grade A Hipster-Lit. The poster child for it in 2013, probably. While i enjoyed the stories, there was some inherent pretentiousness.

Every few years a serious author will get noticed and be BOSS for a while.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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AB_skin_test wrote:You're probably about to get really angry with me..but I think Saunders is Grade A Hipster-Lit. The poster child for it in 2013, probably. While i enjoyed the stories, there was some inherent pretentiousness.

Every few years a serious author will get noticed and be BOSS for a while.
I don't necessarily disagree with this. But if a writer becomes big based on merit, what's the harm? He's written a great book, and it should find an audience. Better Saunders than James Franco, I say.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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I agree completely. Better than the alternative of toiling for decades in obscurity.

And it really is a strong book. Will eventually read more, but I also didn't get a "rush out and get all the saunders" like you did.

Note: This says way more about me than Saunders. There was a time when I'd have loved to have read everything he had but I don't have the energy for that type of reading anymore it seems. This takes a lot more out of you than say, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. So it will be a much longer process.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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Our tastes in fiction don't overlap much, so I'm just happy that you like him at all, frankly.

As for rushing out and reading everything, I'll do that if I find an author who sings to me like this. It happens once or twice a year if I'm lucky.

(And 'Zombie Spaceship Wasteland' is a very good book. It surprised me. I knew that it would be funny, but it's so much more than that. It's not just Oswalt tossing off jokes.)
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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I may have to give up on Render Unto Rome. Getting really dull. And F you two for changing the topic on me and making me look like the jerk. No back to your literary cock sucking session. [off to find Saunders book on mp3 online....]
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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Test Ride the Sybian wrote:I may have to give up on Render Unto Rome. Getting really dull. And F you two for changing the topic on me and making me look like the jerk. No back to your literary cock sucking session. [off to find Saunders book on mp3 online....]

Ooh man. I don't know how it will translate to audiobook. There are some structures in his books that don't lend themselves to that format. But maybe that's just my untrained ear.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

Post by Weatherfrog »

First heard about Saunders at AWP this weekend. I love syfy and short stories. I'm told I will probably like Saunders. Cormac McCarthy like, right? Anyway, advice on where to start?
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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Weathertest wrote:First heard about Saunders at AWP this weekend. I love syfy and short stories. I'm told I will probably like Saunders. Cormac McCarthy like, right? Anyway, advice on where to start?
I see no similarities to McCarthy in the one Saunders collection I have read. And I have read a lot of McCarthy. This may make Semplica Girls angry but I think, even having enjoyed Saunders, that McCarthy is a much better author.

I'll let Semplica Girls weigh in, but I thought Tenth of December was a really good collection and had never read anything previously. That's his latest, and some reviewers say his best.
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Re: George Saunders Thread

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I thought you meant this guy:

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Re: George Saunders Thread

Post by Test Ride the Sybian »

Alright, just downloaded Tenth of December from the library to see what you feckers are going on about.
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