Tenth of December

Tenth of December Review

The title story of Tenth of December follows two characters across a single winter afternoon: Robin, an imaginative and bullied thirteen-year-old who fantasises about rescuing a girl from school from various imagined perils, and Don Eber, a middle-aged man with a terminal illness who has walked into the woods to die on his own terms, having left his coat behind so the cold will finish the job efficiently. Their paths converge at an icy pond. What happens is unexpected, generous, and heartbreaking in ways that accumulate slowly as the story proceeds and then arrive all at once. It may be the finest short story published in American fiction in the twenty-first century.

Tenth of December, which won the Story Prize and was called “the best book you’ll read this year” by the New York Times, is the collection that brought George Saunders to the widest readership. The ten stories here represent the full range of his methods: “Escape from Spiderhead,” set in a pharmaceutical testing facility where prisoners are dosed with experimental emotion-enhancing drugs, uses science fiction premises to ask questions about consent and responsibility that feel entirely contemporary. “Exhortation” is a memo from a middle manager to his staff at a facility whose purpose is never specified but whose effect is the slow destruction of everyone inside it. “Home” follows a recently returned soldier, damaged and displaced, navigating a domestic landscape that no longer quite fits the person he has become.

What unifies these formally diverse pieces is what has always unified Saunders’s work: the conviction that ordinary human beings contain more moral seriousness, more capacity for love and sacrifice, than the systems they inhabit are designed to recognise. His characters are not heroes — they are people who have been shaped by economic pressure, institutional language, and the specific psychological distortions that come from trying to survive inside organisations that do not see them as fully human. The formal innovation in each story is in the service of this conviction: if you want to show what corporate language does to a person, you have to write in corporate language, and then find a way to let the person’s humanity survive inside it.

The collection also contains “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” which follows a father’s attempt to give his daughter a birthday party she will remember, and whose central horror — revealed incrementally, with Saunders’s characteristic patience — is one of the most disturbing images in recent American fiction. It is characteristic of Tenth of December that this horror is handled entirely through the domestic and the ordinary, that the father is sympathetic throughout, and that the moral catastrophe of the story arrives as a form of recognition rather than condemnation. Saunders does not judge his characters. He simply, very carefully, shows us what they are doing.