Review: 'Tenth of December'

TENTH OF DECEMBERBy George Saunders
Literary fiction short stories
January 2013
Random House
ISBN: 978-0812993806

Many of George Saunders's characters in Tenth of December live in complex worlds they have imagined. Even when those worlds bump up against reality, Saunders makes us believe in both the worlds that his characters have imagined and the ones that they inhabit.

The imaginations begin in the opening story, "Victory Lap", in which both a young teenage girl, Alison, imagines herself a princess or the belle of the ball, and her neighbor Kyle suddenly finds himself in a situation where he gets to use his imagination.

Alison's teacher, Mrs. Dees, is a bellweather in Saunders's writing. She isn't fooling herself, but she is the kind of person who carries on. Her husband is cheating on her, but she still comes to her Ethics classes every day and tries to get the students to care. She "still obviously found something fun about life and good about people, because otherwise why sometimes stay up so late grading you come in next day all exhausted, blouse on backward, having messed it up in the early-morning dark, you dear discombobulated thing?"

This is the kind of thinking that propels Kyle when Alison is grabbed by a stranger who comes to her door. Kyle is the son of ultra-controlling parents. Every thing must be just so. They wouldn't be thrilled if he intervened to try to save Alison as the stranger drags her across the yard. What if something happened to him? But Kyle is near his father's prize geode, which he wants placed just so, exactly right, in the yard. And it's too much to resist.

There are three characters whose POV we see things from: Alison, who is nearly 15 and imagines herself a princess; neighbor Kyle, who runs cross country and whose extremely controlling parents expect perfection from their son; and the would-be rapist who abducts Alison from her house and who is spotted with her by Kyle.

Saunders is masterful here at the shifting POVs, the shifting "what if" scenarios and still lets us know what actually happened and what did not, and the ways both parents and children can relate to the parental expectations.

Sunday Sentence: George Saunders

Author David Abrams has started a marvelous idea on his blog, The Quivering Pen. Each Sunday, he posts, without explanation, the best sentence he has read during the week.

Here is mine:

"He'd been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there could
still be many-many drops of goodness, is how it came to him -- many drops of happy -- of good fellowship -- ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not -- had never
been -- his to withheld.
"Withhold."

-- George Saunders, Tenth of December, from the collection with the same title