“Tenth of December” by George Saunders
Tenth of December: Stories
By George Saunders
2014
288 pages / 5 hours and 40 minutes
Fiction
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In my preaching class I highly recommend that my students read great short stories. A short story teaches them one of the most important ingredients of a great sermon: economy. The ability to say a great deal in a very short time is a skill preachers can learn from great short story writers. The ability to develop context, character, and plot in only a few pages (or a few minutes) is a remarkable skill.
Of the truly great contemporary short story writers, there are two who have done it for over a period of a half-century: William Trevor from Ireland and Canadian Alice Monroe. To complete the trinity of great short story writers I would add their somewhat younger American counterpart, George Saunders.
Saunders has recently written a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which gained wide admiration and won the Booker Prize. It tells the tale of Abraham Lincoln grieving the death of his young son from the viewpoint of the ghosts who haunt the cemetery where the young Lincoln is buried. Although it is an excellent novel, I remain convinced that Saunders’s most natural environment is the short story. In fact, among living Americans I feel he has no equal in this medium.
This particular collection, Tenth of December, was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of its 10 Best Books of 2013. There are 10 stories in the book, ranging from only a couple of pages to 60 pages in length. Not all of the stories are equally good but frankly I don’t think there’s a clunker in the whole book.
I find as I’m writing this review that the stories in this book are hard to explain. I’m not sure I know how to tell you what the stories are about. There are some that are sci-fi-ish but that sort of misses the point. Most of the stories, in one way or another, have something to do with class. The poor, the marginalized, and especially all people who are relatively powerless play prominent roles in many of the stories.
Since I’m writing primarily for preachers, I would simply point out that none of the stories strike me as, well, preachy. Saunders is not sermonizing. He is storytelling. Rather than relay plots, I think I would rather suggest the mood of the book. And the word that first comes to my mind in trying to describe that mood is disquieting. I walk away from each of the stories with a feeling of unease. His uncanny, creative meditations on the fallenness of our world and our often less than humane treatment to our fellow human beings is somehow convicting. How does he do that?
The audio version is read by the author and I highly recommend it if you are into audiobooks. As I read my own review, I fear I have made the book gloomier than it actually is. Tenth of December is absolutely dazzling. There is no modern collection of short stories that I would compare to it. If you want to see the short story at its very very best, this is the book. How did he do that?
