george saunders short stories tenth of december

I like KnyghtLyfe™, a drug that enables its user to speak in the language of chivalry (necessary if you have a Medicated Role at a mediaeval theme park), and the television shows How My Child Died Violently and The Worst That Could Happen. Endless satisfaction and instruction is to be received from Saunders’ lists of invented product and place names, television shows and theme parks.

All of his characters are victims of capitalism in some way – from the teenage boy in ‘Jon’, from In Persuasion Nation (2006), who has a device fitted to the back of his neck that runs advertisements continuously through his brain and is given a constant supply of mood-altering drugs to help him ‘evaluate’ them, to the character in ‘Sea Oak’, from Pastoralia (2000), who is fired from his job as a waiter and stripper but shouts desperately ‘It’s been a pleasure!’ as he leaves, because there is so little work available and he is ‘trying not to burn any bridges’. Saunders’ biggest, widest target is capitalism and at his best he makes you notice, as though you had only just noticed, how money and the art of selling things (and the helpless way we go on buying things) have come to govern everything we do. He seems not to be predicting so much as anticipating: a subtle difference. When Saunders writes the future, he creates situations that feel a terrifying hair’s-breadth from our own. Nothing takes place in space, or during the Middle Ages, or on an earth transformed by climate change, but he is a world-builder par excellence, one of the most truly speculative writers of fiction at work today. The state of Kyle’s household, with its directives and Traffic Logs and Work Points, is an example of Saunders’ magical ability to dream up little societies or near-future situations and furnish them with products and sets of rules that instantly cohere into a logical world. Kyle sees Alison in trouble, but he knows that to help will be to violate his parents’ countless ‘directives’, which preclude running in the yard, leaving the yard barefoot, and entering the Secondary Area – beyond the yard – without permission. And here we switch to the point of view of Kyle, her teenage neighbour, whose mental space is colonised by the voices of his terrified, control-freak parents.

Where was either, and Alison has to keep returning and correcting, returning and correcting until she reaches the door, where a truly unkind reality awaits – one that she is absolutely unable to organise into something better. Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.

George saunders short stories tenth of december