A failure to launch

Saunders explores the angst of chasing success, writes Antony Altbeker

On 3 January this year, Joel Lovell, writing in the New York Times Magazine, declared about the newly published Tenth of December, that “George Saunders has written the best book you’ll read this year.

“Those are fighting words,” I thought. “I’m going to read me a whole lot of good books this year. Who do you think you are telling me that the best is already out there?” Worse, Saunders’s book wasn’t even what I usually think of as a “real” book, but a collection of short stories, making it, I thought, even harder to believe he could live up to Lovell’s hype, which, in truth, is probably more a curse than a blessing.

Well, whether or not it turns out to be the best book I read this year, Tenth of December is fantastic. Saunders, who said in a recent interview that his definition of a novel is a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief, writes stories that engage with some of the troubling consequences of the way the world works in the first part of the 21 century. He seems, in particular, to be concerned about the way the American Dream has become a way of rationalising growing inequality, and how its emphasis on the importance of success (material and social) inevitably means that a great many people end up feeling like failures.

These are not the most profound of thoughts, and, having subsequently read some of his essays, I can say that in that form, Saunders’s ideas, while executed well, verge on the commonplace. The highlight of one long piece he wrote about Dubai for GQ, for example, is the equation “Paucity = Rage”. The piece is funny enough, but the idea isn’t overly original.

What makes the short stories work so well, however, is the emotional punch he delivers by inserting you straight into the heads of characters whose sense of their own failure (and the many ways they unsuccessfully try to conceal this from themselves) is all consuming. The effect on the reader is like a brief immersion in - and, therefore, a reminder of - what it feels like to feel a failure.

It is true that Saunders’s characters are ‘types’ and that their success works to some extent through exaggeration. But the exaggerations are pointed. In one story - perhaps the most successful - a father is obsessed by his fear that his children will see him as a failure because he is unable to acquire immigrants from the third world to be used as living ornaments in his garden like other fathers in the neighbourhood have done.

The father knows that there’s something wrong with his need and also that there is something worthy about his youngest daughter’s desire to free the immigrants. He is unable, however, to articulate this and even to properly think it, and, as a result, his need to meet (or appear to meet) the social norms that define success overwhelms him. Tragedy ensues.

I probably won’t be the only reviewer to see many of the stories in Tenth of December as modern riffs on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Like Saunders’s work, Notes (which is a story that found a way to be brief) inhabits the mind of a man consumed by a mounting sense of his own insignificance. It begins, famously, with a note to his reader to the effect that, while the central character in the book is fictional, “such persons not only may but even must exist in our society”.

Whatever the licence Saunders takes with strict realism (even today, few Americans actually have ornamental immigrants), this is a sentiment I’m sure he’d happily append to this collection of stories.

• Altbeker is a writer and editor of Mampoer.co.za. 'Tenth of December', Jonathan Ball Publishers, will be available at Exclusive Books for R318 next month

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