The Literary Emperor is Buck Naked
Amazon says:
Barnes & Noble thinks
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Author: George Saunders
Title: Tenth of December Genre: short stories I heard in a radio interview that George Saunders’ Tenth of December comprises ten short stories. That turned out to be correct. I also heard that it is a work of literary masterpiece. Well, batting .500 would get you in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it won't cut it in literary criticism. Of course I might be roundly castigated for saying so, but this ain't literature: it’s litter-ature. Saunders clearly has an eye for… well, for not very much. He has an eye for bad parents and depressing situations; he has an eye for made-up names of products with lots of InCaps, but he doesn't seem to have an eye for much of anything else. I realize that I’m going against the flow here, but let me be frank: this sort of writing is not a svelte model in a black wool Chanel suit, it’s the equivalent of some walmartian in those navy-blue sweatpants with the bright pink “JUICY” emblazoned across her enormous ass. Yeah, it features all this year’s (or this decade’s) fashionable writing tricks, but it will likely have the staying power of chewing gum. There I said it. Here’s your ten stories: Victory Lap: A high-schooler rescues his next-door neighbor from abduction. Problems: too much self-conscious use of {weird punctuation}; also marks the first appearance of bizarre parenting practices (“Five work points for setting the geode properly.”). Story is entirely inner dialog. Snooooore… Sticks: Has the distinct advantage of being by far the shortest story in the book, less than two pages. Completely pointless; marks second appearance of strange parents. Puppy: Fat, messy people who are bad parents try to sell a puppy to a yuppie. Third appearance of bad parents; utterly depressing on top of that. Escape from Spiderhead: Yay! No bad parents! SciFi-ish tale where convicted criminals are human guinea pigs for testing psychoactive drugs (Verbaluce™ or Darkenfloxx™). Perhaps the best short story of a bad lot… Exhortation: Weird message to employees in the form of an extended memorandum with a sort of Joycian conclusion: “All will be well and all will be well, etc., etc…” Complete and total yuck. Al Roosten: Another completely detestable character talking to himself about how everyone treats him so badly. Talk about your culture of victimhood! Oh, and he's yet another bad parent… The Semplica Girl Diaries: The truly bad parents return in force; this pair blows a $10K windfall on a front lawn to impress their child’s classmates. Idiots. Home: I couldn't finish this one; it was so convoluted and full of relentlessly moronic characters I just skimmed the second half, though I did notice more bad parents and something called MiiVOXmin and MiiVOXmax??? So sue me. My Chivalric Fiasco: Another teenage boy – the sole support of his family (with the deadbeat parents) – gets an overdose of KnightLyfe® and ends up talking too much and saying the wrong things to the wrong people. More inCaps: TorchLightNight and SifterBoyDeLux… Tenth of December: Fat kid, who for once has mediocre-to-good parents, has really active fantasy life and accidentally has a wonderful interaction with a suicidal cancer patient in which both almost die. They don’t; this is about as undepressing as Saunders gets in this collection. So, folks, I'm sorry, but my advice is to to give Tenth of December a pass. Saunders may be the darling of the black-clad self-absorbed crowd, but any book that advertises on its cover that it is “Subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing” is too full of itself to be readable. At the very least, the reviewer got that “hilarious” dead wrong. Oh, and a previous Saunders work? CivilWarLand in Bad Decline – I see a trend here... |