Saunders Does It Again

George Saunders is one of the writers who can make me cry. He did it again with this new story, "Tenth of December"—in which, as he did in "Escape from Spiderhead," Saunders seems to be working through his feelings about the suicide of his friend and artistic compatriot David Foster Wallace.

A teacher of writing at Syracuse, Saunders is also a reliably perceptive commentator on his own work and on the craft of fiction. This Q&A with Deborah Treisman is no exception. Here's a nice bit:

I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general—the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

A Covenant of Pathos

From an interview with George Saunders about his story in the current New Yorker, a passage that I think crystallizes what I love about him (i.e., his humanity toward his characters):

Deborah Treisman: You seem, ultimately, to have a lot of sympathy for Mike, despite whatever it is that he has (or hasn’t) done, and the violent urges that keep surging up in him. Why is that?

George Saunders: Well, yes—I think that’s one of the fundamental goals of fiction, and its most efficient modus operandi: as a writer you’ve got to keep trying to “de-Other” your narrator until you’ve established him as basically you but on a different day. (I mean, that’s not the only way, but it is a way that, for me, can have the effect of making the narrator non-negligible, i.e., of minimizing the possibility of authorial slumming/puppeteering.) There’s this funny thing where the technical stuff (trying to make the voice convincing and compelling; operating at a sufficient level of detail; trying to keep the reader emotionally with the narrator) will dovetail with the moral valence of the piece—that is, technique leads to sympathy, or maybe, the appearance of sympathy.

I may have to pay the Art Institute a commission for these quotations I’m nonchalantly dropping in here, but here’s something the German artist Ludwig Meidner said that seems relevant to this question: “Do not be afraid of the face of a human being. Don’t let your pen stop until the soul of that one opposite you is wedded to yours in a covenant of pathos.”

What a Story Can Be

Some wisdom from the great George Saunders, at the end of this interview:

I like the idea that a story—well, that we don’t really know what it is, exactly. And that this is actually the purpose of every story: to find one more active, breathing example of what a story can be.

Escape from Spiderhead

**Spoiler Alert**

George Saunders's story "Escape from Spiderhead," in the current New Yorker, has echoes of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers For Algernon," as well as some previous Saunders stories: the clinical horror of "93990" and the clinical entrapment of "Jon"; along with an ending that's quite similar to the ending of "CommComm." At times it veers on the edge of the thought-experiment quality that made "In Persuasion Nation" and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil less successful as fully realized fictional worlds. But, on the whole, it's a gripping story, a "wild ride," to use Saunders's own term from this fascinating and illuminating interview with Deborah Treisman—and it lingers in one's mind.

In the interview, Saunders asserts that "if the writer is doing his job the story will have an understory that steadily becomes more apparent." In Saunders's own best work, the "understories" are multifaceted and echo off each other in interesting ways. Thus "Jon" can be a re-working of Plato's cave allegory, a satire of our modern advertising-soaked brains, an intiation story, as well as a human drama "about having to rise to the occasion of love," as Saunders puts it.

One of the understories in "Escape from Spiderhead," I think, is the suicide of David Foster Wallace, who was not only a friend of George Saunders but also very much akin to him as an artist.

Though another of Wallace's friends, Jonathan Franzen, dismisses the notion that DFW's suicide can be explained as being the result of a chemical imbalance, most accounts of Wallace's final months make it clear that he had gone off his normal meds because he disliked the side effects, but that the change in medication left him adrift, feeling the kind of terrifying depression that a character in Infinite Jest memorably compares to being in a top floor of a burning building, weighing the fear of immolation against the fear of jumping out the window to one's death. It seems to me that, in fact, recognizing the chemical aspect to Wallace's suicide is actually part of a humane and sympathetic response.

"Escape from Spiderhead" forces us to think about chemicals, about how much of what we think of as our identities depends upon the chemicals that our bodies produce. The prisoner test subjects in the story are all equipped with "MobiPaks" by which researchers intravenously pump drugs into them. These drugs can make them obedient, articulate, or sexually erect. Indeed, they can make them fall in love. Or they can make them suicidally depressed.

In the climax of the story, the main character chooses to dose himself with Darkenfloxx, which has already driven one test subject to destroy herself, in order to avoid being a party to the death of yet another. Here's the result:

Then came the horror: worse than I’d ever imagined.... Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here’s how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.

It's a horrifyingly succinct description of suicide—and the first thing I thought of as I read it was David Foster Wallace, and how his death could be summed up just as briefly and horrifyingly: belt, patio rafter. Also, how Wallace's death, judging by his own descriptions of suicidal depression, was probably precipitated by just this type of unbearable psychic pain.

Saunders's story, perhaps at some level inspired by its author's response to his friend's suicide, moves beyond Franzen's snarkily dismissive statement about chemical imbalances and confronts us instead with profound mysteries: What if our personalities, our actions, our happiness or sadness are, in large part, determined by the chemicals in our bodies, our brains? How do we understand ourselves and each other? How does that affect our notion of morality? How should that influence the organization of our societies? What does it mean to be human? To be humane?

Ettlinger's Photos

I enjoyed this Millions piece about Marion Ettlinger's photographs of writers. Edan Lepucki gets the general feel of these photos right:

Her photos are black and white, with an antiquated vibe, as if we’d only recently progressed beyond Daguerreotypes. Her subjects look distinguished, serious, old fashioned.

It's a look that works well for Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, or Alice Munro. But it's all wrong for George Saunders, Sherman Alexie, and Jhumpa Lahiri. It doesn't at all match the feel of their writing.

I guess my problem with Ettlinger, then, is that her style is her style. She remakes the writer in her image, instead of using photography to bring out the essence of the writer and the writer's work.

I Don't Wanna Be Jon

From my cousin-in-law Jeff at NewsFuturist, a vision that is eerily reminiscent of George Saunders's great, great story "Jon," in which the title character's view of the world is occluded by a constant stream of advertisements pre-loaded onto a hard drive installed in the back of his head:

The future will bring us heads-up displays that project our Internet data stream onto our view of the world. The location-aware data will be viewed on top of the actual location. It sounds like goofy sci-fi today, but so did the cell phone in the early 1990s. Devices to do this already exist, and will become cheaper and more accessible (and stylish) as technology improves and the mobile/data trends discussed above simultaneously create the demand for them. Short-term, this will likely happen through special eyeglasses or contact lenses. Eventually, we may have ability to feed the data overlay directly to the retina.

Please, God, don't let it come to this. (Sorry, Jeff.) I'm addicted enough as it is.

A Bigger Fan

This is nothing new (it's almost two years old), but it is a nice little anecdote about David Foster Wallace's personal kindness. Rebecca Curtis, in the midst of a piece about the excellence of George Saunders's "Sea Oak," tells a story about writing DFW in January 2007 to ask him to provide a blurb for her book (incidentally, what chutzpah!):

Eight months ago, I wrote a letter to David Foster Wallace, on the thin premise that he teaches at my alma mater, in an attempt to get him to blurb my book. I was desperate. My publishers had hinted that if I didn't get a blurb soon, I was cooked. They'd sent me a list of writers, all of whose work I loathed, and urged me to contact them, praise them, and beg for blurbs. I felt I must keep my dignity. So I deleted the email with the list, and told my publishers I'd sent long letters to the writers but they never wrote back. Wallace (whose fiction is fabulous) is notoriously reclusive, and does not respond to missives. I wrote and swore to never demean him by going on about how much I like his work. Instead, I said that George Saunders, who'd been my teacher in the MFA program at Syracuse, is a fan. I said George teaches his stories, and mentioned a few remarks George makes when teaching them. Wallace answered that week (no blurb). He said, "I am 47,000,000 times a bigger fan of Saunders than he of me—trust me on this."

The Updike of Our Time

An anonymous reader of this blog poses the following interesting questions in response to the Jeffrey Eugenides passage I quoted on Thursday:

OK, then. Let's ask the obvious if unanswerable questions: Who, if anyone, are the candidates to be the Updike of our time? Is there anyone in the rising generation of novelists or short story writers who is tapping a vein of experience common to those of us who are reaching middle age these days? Or is there, perhaps, no common vein of experience for this generation, no common trajectory to our post-collegiate lives? (Job, marriage, suburbia, boredom, adultery is a story people keep telling but with less and less relevance it would seem; hence, my lack of enthusiasm for Revolutionary Road despite my crush on Kate Winslet.) But then, was there ever, really, a common arc to our lives, or did it only look that way at a time when the American literary community was a pretty exclusive club? My parents didn't have Updike novels on the nightstand when I was growing up.

We had no Updike in our house when I was growing up, either. Eugenides perhaps overstates his case a bit. But I do think that he's on to something: the Baby Boom did constitute an unusually large and homogeneous cohort of people, and the portion of that cohort that reads literary fiction is, as a consequence, also unusually large, at least in relative terms. It was that group that became Updike's audience, making it profitable for him to publish more than a book a year for fifty years. That's at least how I understand Eugenides's point.

Could there be such an audience and such a writer for the next generation? My sense is no. Partly because the audience for books has shrunk. Here's how Updike himself diagnosed the problem:

When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop -- it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word. They're less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad. It's momentarily uphill, I would say.

And who's to blame? Well, everything's to blame. Moviesare to blame, for stealing a lot of the novel's thunder. Why read a novel when in two hours you can just go passively sit and be dazzled and amazed and terrified? Television is to blame, especially because it's come into the home. It's brought the fascination of the flickering image right into the house; like turning on a faucet, you can have it whenever you want. I was a movie addict, but you could only see so many movies in the course of a week. I still had a lot of time to read, and so did other people. But I think television would take all your day if you let it. Now we have these cultural developments on the Internet, and online, and the computer offering itself as a cultural tool, as a tool of distributing not just information but arts -- and who knows what inroads will be made there into the world of the book.

If I had to identify the writer who came closest to tapping the generational vein of experience after Updike's, I'd probably point to the late David Foster Wallace. The outpouring of grief on the Internet in the wake of Wallace's death suggests that his work held the same type of deep generational meaning that Updike's does. In this famous essay, DFW kills off Updike in an Oedipal fashion, essentially declaring that he and his generation have outlived their relevance. And just as, for Eugenides, Updike embodied the image of "writer," I think Wallace did the same for his generation, as exemplified by this gag from the Onion:

 

Wallace's work, particularly his fiction, is less accessible than Updike's. But who knows? His final story published in the New Yorker seemed to indicate that he was headed in a less obscure direction; and the release of Jon Krasinski's film version of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men might have brought him a wider audience. (Before his death, I was often startled to find only one or two of his books for sale even at Borders.) Wallace also supported himself (did he have to?) by teaching, something that Updike did only very briefly. Is it even possible for an Updike to make it as a full-time writer anymore?  

In more ways than one, Updike was an extraordinary figure. Though he was aided by demographics, perhaps, his verbal abilities were amazing and his work ethic astounding. In that sense, we may not see "another Updike" for generations, or ever. With Wallace gone before his time, is there anyone to take his place as a kind of generational writer, in tune with a certain zeitgeist and a certain significant slice of sophisticated readers? 

George Saunders? 

"Jon" on Stage

George Saunders's story "Jon" is a biblical allegory, a version of Plato's allegory of the cave, an initiation story, a satire (with a heart) of our contemporary, advertising-soaked culture, and one of my all-time favorites. According to Larry Dark's blog, it has also now been adapted into a play.