George Saunders

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“What Will The Future Look Like, Given That Premise?”

November 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Even at his most outlandish, George Saunders never seems to me to be writing about the future but about life right now. What is a quiet nightmare The Semplica Girls Diaries about if not growing divide between the haves and have-nots as we shift from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital one, the way technocracy removes the friction from our lives and disappears the “downsized” from our minds?

In a New York Times Magazine conversation, Saunders and Jennifer Egan discuss the futuristic in fiction. An excerpt:

George Saunders:

One topic I’d like to someday take on in a work of “futuristic” fiction is our increasing materialism — we are coming to believe that our minds are entirely sufficient to understand the universe in its entirety. This means a shrinking respect for mystery — religion vanishing as a meaningful part of our lives (or being used, in its fundamentalist forms, to beat back mystery, rather than engage it); an increasing acceptance that if something is “effective” (profitable, stockholder-enhancing), then that answers all questions of its morality. This insistence on the literal and provable and data-based and pragmatic leaves us, I think, only partly human. What will the future look like, given that premise? Bleak, I’d say. But interesting.

I’m actually working on a novel based in the past now, and to me, there are some parallels between writing about the future and writing about the past. Neither interests me at all, if the intention is just to “get it right.” It’s nearly impossible to recreate a past mind-set, and also, why bother? That mind-set already existed, if you see what I mean. The goal of a work of fiction is, in my view, to say something, about how life is for us, not at any particular historical moment (past or present or future) but at every single moment. By necessity, we have to choose some precise time to depict, but we wouldn’t want to confuse ourselves by thinking that the “correct depiction” of that time was the goal.

Jennifer Egan:

I’m curious what period are you writing about, and what led you to do that?

George Saunders:

Yeah, I’m going to be a little secretive about it, as sort of a mojo-protection move. … but it’s the 19th century. And the motivation for doing it was just this really cool, sad story I heard around 1998. For years, I was playing with that idea in different modes and screwing it up, and then one day I had a little insight into how I might do it. It’s also got a supernatural element. So, weirdly, although it’s ostensibly “historical,” it actually feels more like a sci-fi story than anything I’ve ever done before. There’s a heavy element of world-building — figuring out the internal rules of the place and so on.•

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“Some Of Us Turn On One Another”

November 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I think Pastoralia is still my favorite George Saunders short-story collection, though I really love them all, their devastating deadpan and deep humanity. A very cool T magazine feature publishes new annotations made by authors in 75 first editions to be auctioned at Sotheby’s to benefit the PEN American Center. An example from Saunders’ oeuvre follows.

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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders, published in 1996.

At the end, Saunders writes: ‘Closing thought: I like the audacity of this book. I like less the places where it feels like I went into Auto-Quirky Mode. Ah youth! Some issues: Life amid limitations; paucity. Various tonalities of defense. Pain; humiliation inflicted on hapless workers – some of us turn on one another. Early on, this read, could really feel this young writer’s aversion to anything mild or typical or bland. Feeling, at first, like a tic. But then it started to grow on me — around ‘400 Pound CEO.’ This performative thing then starts to feel essential; organic somehow – a way to get to the moral outrage. I kept thinking of the word ‘immoderation.’ Like the yelp of someone who’s just been burned.”

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“Whatever Gentleness Or Wisdom Or Love I Have, It Only Comes Out In Extraordinary Or Cruel Circumstances”

December 8, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a video from the New Yorker site with a frequent contributor to that publication, the short-story writer George Saunders, whose work is as informed by genre films and stand-up comedy as by literature. I can’t tell you how many times this year I’ve found myself thinking, from out of the blue, about “The Semplica-Girls Diaries,” a selection from his most recent collection, Tenth of December.

In this video, Saunders refers to Donald Barthelme’s essay, “Not-Knowing,” which you can read here.

Both Saunders and Barthelme have suggested reading lists.

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A Reading List Curated By George Saunders

May 23, 2013 in Books | Permalink

The only brick-and-mortar bookstore I go to anymore is the Strand in Manhattan. The shop’s website is unreliable as hell when it comes to letting you know what volumes are in stock in the store, but it has an amazing amount of really good books, and you can save some bucks if you’re a smart shopper. The Strand asks different writers to a curate a shelf (a table, actually) of their favorite works. The following is a list of George Saunders’ 56 selections. What’s the most surprising choice? Bright Lights, Big City, maybe?

  • The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro
  • Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • Sakhalin Island (Alma Classics) by Anton Chekhov
  • Airships by Barry Hannah
  • Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
  • I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal
  • Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  • Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms by Daniil Kharms
  • Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
  • Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
  • In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
  • Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes
  • Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
  • Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
  • A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
  • Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein
  • The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx by Groucho Marx
  • The Bridegroom by Ha Jin
  • Loving/Living/Party Going by Henry Green
  • Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
  • 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel
  • The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel
  • A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev
  • Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac
  • Dubliners by James Joyce 
  • Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
  • Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects by Kerry Brougher
  • Dos Passos: U.S.A., 42nd Parallel, 1919, Big Money by John Dos Passos
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  • Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
  • Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
  • Hadji Murat (Vintage Classics) by Leo Tolstoy
  • Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
  • Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  • One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko by Mike Royko
  • A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
  • Dead Souls (Wordsworth Classics) by Nikolai Gogol
  • Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol
  • Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik 
  • Cathedral by Raymond Carver
  • Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates 
  • All the King’s Men (Restored Edition) by Robert Penn Warren
  • Children of Light by Robert Stone
  • Living End by Stanley Elkin
  • The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek
  • The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
  • The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff
  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  • I Will Bear Witness, 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years by Victor Klemperer 
  • Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
  • Ironweed by William Kennedy
  • The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn

 

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“I Think The Thing With A Story Is, It’s Kind Of Genetically Related To A Joke”

May 9, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Two recent George Saunders TV appearances if you missed them, with Stephen Colbert and George Stephanopoulos. Ayn Rand, interestingly, is mentioned in both interviews, as a punchline for Colbert and in a serious vein with Stephanopoulos, as Saunders cops to being a right-winger as a youth.

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“The Idea Of Writing Really Quickly, For Free, Offends Me”

April 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I love George Saunders and his deeply funny, deeply moving short stories, and he’s a wonderful journalist as well (like here and here). His fiction has a high-risk style, a seemingly unrestrained combo of Raymond Carver and Groucho Marx, and while I always fear he’ll go over the top completely, like, say, Kurt Vonnegut did with Slapstick, Saunders keeps maturing, deepening. His most recent collection, Tenth of December, is wonderful overall, and “The Semplica-Girls Diaries” is one of the best things he’s ever written, satire that is so sad and humane. Saunders was just interviewed about his computer desktop, of all things, by Ben Johncock for the Guardian. An excerpt:

“Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: ‘Oh, I should tweet about this.’ Which knowing me, I know there would be. I’m sure some people can do it in a fun and healthy way, but I don’t think I could. Plus, it’s kind of funny – I’ve spent my whole life learning to write very slowly, for maximum expressiveness, and for money. So the idea of writing really quickly, for free, offends me. Also, one of the simplify-life things I’m doing is to try to just write fiction, period. There was a time there a few years back where, and screenplays, and travel journalism so on – just trying to keep the juices flowing and kick open some new doors. These, in turn, led to a period of sort of higher public exposure – TV appearances here in the US and some quasi-pundit-like moments. To be honest, this made me feel kind of queasy. I’m not that good on my feet and I found that I really craved the feeling of deep focus and integrity that comes with writing fiction day after day, in a sort of monastic way. So that’s what I’m trying to do now, as much as I can manage. And Twitter doesn’t figure into that.”

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“I Like Technology. I Just Think It’s Complicated And Funny.”

January 22, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

From Casey Burchby’s recent Los Angeles Review of Books interview with George Saunders about the satirist’s new short-story collection, a passage about his characters interacting with technology:

“Casey Burchby: 

In a number of these (and your previous) stories, characters find themselves grappling with strange technological ‘innovations.’ Does technology disturb you? Do you avoid computers and gadgets?

George Saunders:

No, not at all. I like technology. I just think it’s complicated and funny, I guess — the way our basic neuroses are always seeking a home, and whenever we invent something new, our neuroses rush over there and get writ large. Before there were cellphones and Twitter and Facebook were people narcissistic? Ha. But those are beautiful ways of heightening our narcissism and putting a big old spotlight on it. And really — as above — my experience has been that I don’t choose a topic or theme or anything like that, but just sort of wade in and see if I can get any magic going on the sentence level — and then ‘story’ comes out of that, as do ‘meaning’and ‘theme’ and all of that, and occasionally a weird new technology. The main job is to make some forward momentum and language-level engagement, I think — and then the rest of the stuff, meaning, theme, etc., has to — and will – take care of itself.

Or to put it another way: if the writer comes up with some strange device, and then lets people play with it, we are going to find out about people. If we have a device that lets us look into other people’s thoughts, we are going to find out about, say, humans’ need for attention and their pride and so on. ‘What does she think when she first catches sight of me? What? A big nose? I do not have a big nose!’ So that story isn’t really about that device, or about technology — but about, say, pride, or self-regard. So the technology or sci-fi aspects are, I guess, means to an (old, classic, traditional) end: hold a mirror up to human foibles and tendencies.

Casey Burchby: 

Several stories in the book — ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’and ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ particularly — revolve around forms of technology that characters aren’t able or willing to engage because of moral or other ramifications. Does technological gimmickry start to endanger people beyond a certain point?

George Saunders: 

That’s a big question, and I guess I’d just have to say sure it does, sometimes. (Witness the atom bomb or that 1970s craze of ‘Asbestos Underwear.’) But as I mentioned above — the devices used in those stories are there mostly as tools — tools to get the moral-ethical wheels turning a bit and turn up the volume. And to be a degree more honest — on ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries,’ the whole thing came out of a dream I had. And when I woke up the dream didn’t seem insane, but weirdly charged — and I felt excited to try and flesh that world out. And the basic weird tech idea in the story was in the dream. So whatever was happening, it was my sub-conscious supplying the root material. And the only thing I ‘decided’was to go ahead and try it and see if I could make it stand up on its feet as a story. Very mysterious, really — I think sometimes we forget that art is really coming from somewhere other than our intention or decisions — it’s a gift from somewhere kind of unknown to us, except in glimpses…”

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“This Is Like A Freaking Dream, I Love It, I, Wow…”

May 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dubai, 1993.

From “The New Mecca,” George Saunders 2005 GQ article about Dubai before the worldwide recession slowed down (somewhat) that next-level nation-state’s otherworldly development if not its outlandish dreams:

IN WHICH I FALL IN LOVE WITH A FAKE TOWN

From the air, Dubai looked something like Dallas circa 1985: a vast expanse of one- or two-story white boxes, punctuated by clusters of freakish skyscrapers. (An Indian kid shouted, “Dad, looks like a microchip!”) Driving in from the airport, you’re struck by the usual first-night-in-new-country exotica (“There’s a Harley-Davidson dealership—right in the Middle East!“), and the skyscraper clusters were, okay, odd looking (like four or five architects had staged a weird-off, with unlimited funds)—but all in all, it was, you know, a city. And I wondered what all the fuss was about.

Then I got to my hotel.

The Madinat Jumeirah is, near as I can figure, a superresort consisting of three, or possibly six, luxury sub-hotels and two, or maybe three, clusters of luxury villas, spread out over about forty acres, or for all I know it was twelve sub-hotels and nine luxury-villa clusters—I really couldn’t tell, so seamless and extravagant and confusing was all the luxury. The Madinat is themed to resemble an ancient Arabian village. But to say the Madinat is themed doesn’t begin to express the intensity and opulence and areal extent of the theming. The site is crisscrossed by 2.3 miles of fake creeks, trolled night and day by dozens of fake Arabian water taxis (abras) piloted by what I can only describe as fake Arabs because, though dressed like old-timey Arabs, they are actually young, smiling, sweet-hearted guys from Nepal or Kenya or the Philippines, who speak terrific English as they pilot the soundless electrical abras through this lush, created Arabia, looking for someone to take back to the lobby, or to the largest outdoor pool in the Middle East, or over to Trader Vic’s, which is also themed and looks something like a mysterious ancient Casbah inexplicably filled with beautiful contemporary people.

And so, though my first response to elaborate Theming is often irony (Who did this? And why? Look at that modern exit sign over that eighteenth-century bedstead. Haw!), what I found during my stay at the Madinat is that irony is actually my first response to tepid, lame Theming. In the belly of radical Theming, my first response was to want to stay forever, bring my family over, set up shop in my hut-evoking villa, and never go home again.

Because the truth is, it’s beautiful. The air is perfumed, you hear fountains, the tinkling of bells, distant chanted prayers, and when the (real) Arabian moon comes up, yellow and attenuated, over a (fake) Arabian wind tower, you feel you are a resident of some ancient city—or rather, some ancient city if you had dreamed the ancient city, and the ancient city had been purged of all disease, death, and corruption, and you were a Founder/Elder of that city, much beloved by your Citizens, the Staff.

Wandering around one night, a little lost, I came to the realization that verisimilitude and pleasure are not causally related. How is this ‘fake’? This is real flowing water, the date and palm trees are real, the smell of incense and rose water is real. The staggering effect of the immense scale of one particular crosswalk—which joins two hotels together and is, if you can imagine this, a four-story ornate crosswalk that looks like it should have 10,000 cheering Imperial Troops clustered under it and an enigmatic young Princess waving from one of its arabesquey windows—that effect is real. You feel it in your gut and your legs. It makes you feel happy and heroic and a little breathless, in love anew with the world and its possibilities. You have somehow entered the landscape of a dream, the Platonic realization of the idea of Ancient Village—but there are real smells here, and when, a little dazzled, you mutter to yourself (“This is like a freaking dream, I love it, I, wow…”), you don’t wake up, but instead a smiling Filipino kid comes up and asks if you’d like a drink.

On the flight over, I watched an interview with an employee of Jumeirah International, the company that manages the Madinat. Even though he saw it going up himself, he said, he feels it is an ancient place every time he enters and finds it hard to believe that, three years ago, it was all just sand.•

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“On The Pile Of Grave Dirt Is A Butt-Shaped Mark”

July 14, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Always loved the deeply funny and deeply humanistic short story, “Sea Oak,” by George Saunders. Included in the Pastoralia collection, it uses the B-movie trope of the reanimation of the dead, as recently deceased Aunt Bernie rises from the grave to bring some order to her dysfunctional, at-risk family. Read the whole story here. An excerpt

“Where the grave used to be is just a hole. Inside the hole is the Amber Mist, with the top missing. Inside the Amber Mist is nothing. No Aunt Bernie.
      ‘What the hell,’ says Jade. ‘Where’s Bernie?’
      ‘Somebody stole Bernie?’ says Min.
      ‘At least you folks have retained your feet,’ says Father Brian. ‘I’m telling you I literally sat right down. I sat right down on that pile of dirt. I dropped as if shot. See that mark? That’s where I sat.’
      On the pile of grave dirt is a butt-shaped mark.
      The cops show up and one climbs down in the hole with a tape measure and a camera. After three or four flashes he climbs out and hands Ma a pair of blue pumps.
      ‘Her little shoes,’ says Ma. ‘Oh my God.’
      ‘Are those them?’ says Jade.
      ‘Those are them,’ says Min.
      ‘I am freaking out,’ says Jade.
      ‘I am totally freaking out,’ says Min.
      ‘I’m gonna sit,’ says Ma, and drops into the golf cart.
      ‘What I don’t get is who’d want her?’ says Min.
      ‘She was just this lady,’ says Jade.
      ‘Typically it’s teens?’ one cop says. ‘Typically we find the loved one nearby? Once we found the loved one nearby with, you know, a cigarette between its lips, wearing a sombrero? These kids today got a lot more nerve than we ever did. I never would’ve dreamed of digging up a dead corpse when I was a teen. You might tip over a stone, sure, you might spray-paint something on a crypt, you might, you know, give a wino a hotfoot.’
      ‘But this, jeez,’ says Freddie. ‘This is a entirely different ballgame.’
      ‘Boy howdy,’ says the cop, and we all look down at the shoes in Ma’s hands.'”

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Another George Saunders post:

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“Richard Died, The Guy They Called The Birdman. He Got Hit By A Train.”

April 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An excerpt from the 2009 GQ article, “Tent City, U.S.A.” an eyewitness account of a latter-day Hooverville in Fresno, California, by George Saunders, the fiercely humanistic short story writer who uses humor the way Twain and Vonnegut did:

“OH, LOTS OF PEOPLE die in here.

The Ho man died. Gladys died. Ferdinand over here died. A guy by the name of Tupac got ran over by a train right here. Richard died, the guy they called the Birdman. He got hit by a train, just back in January, January 31. Because the Mission denied him to stay overnight, he got a blanket from a friend and stayed behind one of the train cars, and lo and behold, they were switching at night, and he was asleep, and evidently they just popped him like a strawberry basically. Really a super guy. But mentally challenged. He would shoot birds, thinking they were there. Very strange fellow. Not with an actual gun, no. Just with his fingers.

There was Edson. He was alcoholic, a good man, but mind you, his son was a professional baseball player. He could have lived differently, but he chose to be out here drinking. There was a lady got hit on the freeway couple months ago. She was crossing the 99, wasn’t paying attention. We’ve had overdoses, stabbings. One homeless guy got burned in his blankets. Some juveniles poured gas on him. We had two people shot here in the past three months. One of them, I was sitting right here when I heard five sharp pops from under the bridge. Then here came this little gal, racing by, shrieking, I told you I’d do it! I told you I’d do it! And she disappeared from Tent City and was never seen again, and the guy she shot in the face died.” (Thanks Longform.)

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