Damon Winter/The New York Times, George Saunders By JOEL
LOVELL Published: January 3, 2013 37
In a little sushi restaurant in Syracuse, George
Saunders conceded that, sure, one reality was that he and I were a couple guys
talking fiction and eating avocado salad and listening to Alanis Morissette
coming from the speaker above our heads. Another was that we were walking
corpses. We’d been on the subject of death for a while. A friend I loved very
much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still
found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed —
and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because
it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much.
I was having some trouble articulating it, but Saunders was right there,
leaning in and encouraging. He has a bushy blond mustache and goatee going
gray, and sometimes, when he’s listening intently, he can look a little stern,
as if he just stepped out of a tent at Antietam. But then he starts talking and
the eyebrows go up and it’s all Chicago vowels and twinkly Doug Henning eyes,
and if you didn’t know that he was more or less universally regarded as a
genius, you might peg him as the superfriendly host of a woodworking show on
daytime public access.
“It would be
so interesting if we could stay like that,” Saunders said, meaning: if we could
conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes with proximity
to death. He described a flight from Chicago to Syracuse that he was on a
little over 10 years ago. “We were flying along, and I’ve got a guilty pleasure
— I’m reading Vanity Fair — and I’m on my way home. And suddenly there’s this
crazy sound, like a minivan hit the side of the plane. And I thought, Uh, oh,
I’m not even gonna look up. If I don’t look up from the magazine, it’s not
happening. And then it happened again.”
Everyone starts screaming, the plane is making
terrible metal-in-distress sounds. Black smoke — “black like in a Batman movie”
— starts streaming out of the fresh-air nozzles overhead. They turn back toward
O’Hare, “and there’s that grid of Chicago, and I’m seeing it coming up really
fast.” The lights flicker, and the pilot comes on and tells everyone, with
panic in his voice, to stay buckled. “And there’s this little 14-year-old boy
next to me. He turns to me and says, ‘Sir, is this supposed to be happening?’
“And I remember thinking, No, no, no, no, no, no,
no. Just that one syllable, over and over. And also thinking, You could
actually piss yourself. And the strongest thing was the sense of that seat
right there.” He pointed toward the imaginary seat back in front of him. “I thought,
Oh, yeah, this body. I’ve had it all this time, and that’s what’s going to do
it. That right there.” He had assumed that if he was ever faced with death, he
would “handle it with aplomb,” he would be present in the moment, he would make
peace in the time he had left. “But I couldn’t even remember my own name,” he
said. “I was so completely not present. I was just the word no.”
Eventually he managed to turn to the kid next to him
and say that it was going to be O.K., “though I didn’t think so. And there was
a woman across the aisle. And finally — it was like coming out of a deep freeze
— I could just reach over, and I took her hand.” That’s how they remained for
the next several minutes, waiting to die.
In the end, they didn’t crash into the Chicago streets
or plunge into the freezing lake but made it safely to the runway, where all
the emergency-response equipment was in place but not needed. It turned out, in
a detail that could have been lifted from a George Saunders story, they all
nearly died because the plane had flown into a flock of geese.
“For three or four days after that,” he said, “it
was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I
thought, If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that
awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”
You could call this desire — to really have that
awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and
stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace — the George Saunders Experiment.
It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.”
Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the
country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the
most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of
ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would
lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and
result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a
portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons
that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children
asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond
with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is
the writer for our time.
This week, Saunders’s fourth
book of stories, “Tenth of December,” will be published by Random House. He is
54 years old and published his first book, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” in
1996, when he was 37. Since then there have been two other collections,
“Pastoralia” and “In Persuasion Nation”; a novella, “The Brief and Frightening
Reign of Phil”; a children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip”; and a
collection of reported nonfiction, essays and short humor pieces called “The
Braindead Megaphone.”
When “CivilWarLand” first came out, there was a lot
of talk about Saunders as a new, savage, satirical voice bursting onto the
scene, though he’d been publishing the stories one at a time over eight years,
writing them while making a living at a day job preparing technical reports for
a company called the Radian Corporation, in Rochester. His stories are set in
what might be described as a just slightly futuristic America or, maybe better,
present-day America, where, because of the exigencies of capitalism, things
have gotten a little weird. These initial stories often take place in theme
parks gone to seed or soul-withering exurban office strips, but the stories
themselves are overflowing with vitality; they are sometimes very dark but they
are also very, very funny. The characters speak in a strange new language — a
kind of heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular that is
built around self-improvement clichés (“It made me livid and twice that night I
had to step into a closet and perform my Hatred Abatement Breathing”) — and
this lends them the feeling of allegory, though they are something else too,
that’s harder to place. The book was published right around the same time as
David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and it felt back then as if those two
writers (and a handful of others) were busy establishing the new terms for
contemporary American fiction.
I remember Wallace coming into the offices of
Harper’s Magazine, where I worked at the time, just before or after the book
party for “Infinite Jest” (which has maybe gotten more attention than any book
party in memory, with the descriptions of Wallace hiding in an upstairs room,
away from the hundreds of people there to celebrate or be close to his genius).
It’s hard to know now if Wallace actually looked spooked or if I’m projecting
that look back onto him, but I do clearly recall him standing in the hall in
his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer
in America.
That kind of thing has been said a lot about
Saunders since then. For people who pay close attention to the state of
American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero. His stories now appear
regularly in The New Yorker, he has been anthologized all over the place, and
he has won a bunch of awards, among them a “genius grant” in 2006 from the
MacArthur Foundation, which described him as a “highly imaginative author [who]
continues to influence a generation of young writers and brings to contemporary
American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own.” As
Joshua Ferris recently wrote in an introduction for the reissue last fall, in
e-book form, of “CivilWarLand”: “Part of the reason it’s so hard to talk about
him is the shared acknowledgment among writers that Saunders is somehow a
little more than just a writer. . . . [He] writes like something of a saint. He
seems in touch with some better being.”
It is true that if there exists a “writer’s writer,”
Saunders is the guy. “There is really no one like him,” Lorrie Moore wrote. “He
is an original — but everyone knows that.” Tobias Wolff, who taught Saunders
when he was in the graduate writing program at Syracuse in the mid-’80s, said,
“He’s been one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years,”
and then added what may be the most elegant compliment I’ve ever heard paid to
another person: “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in
a small way around him.” And Mary Karr, who has been a colleague of Saunders’s
at Syracuse since he joined the faculty in the mid-’90s (and who also,
incidentally, is a practicing Catholic with a wonderful singing voice and a
spectacularly inventive foul mouth), told me, “I think he’s the best
short-story writer in English alive.”
Aside from all the formal invention and satirical
energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get
its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work
for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to
understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to
find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing
is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly
even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else
quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in
very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back
from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant
(sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and
showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family
avert a tragic future that she has foretold.
Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me
this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing
parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how
the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion.
Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people
cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”
And “Tenth of December” is more moving and
emotionally accessible than anything that has come before. “I want to be more
expansive,” Saunders said. “If there are 10 readers out there, let’s assume I’m
never going to reach two of them. They’ll never be interested. And let’s say
I’ve already got three of them, maybe four. If there’s something in my work
that’s making numbers five, six and seven turn off to it, I’d like to figure
out what that is. I can’t change who I am and what I do, but maybe there’s a
way to reach those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might
not have appealed to. I’d like to make a basket big enough that it included
them.”
There are stories in this new book that are
recognizably Saundersian: one that’s largely told in fake chivalric speech, for
example, and another, the most purely satirical in the book, in the form of a
memorandum from “Todd Birnie, Divisional Director” RE: “March Performance
Stats.” (What Todd is the divisional director of is never explicitly stated,
but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the euphemisms his memo is
constructed of mask something horribly dark.) But several of the new stories
stake out emotional territory Saunders has never quite ventured into before, at
least not this deeply. The title story, for instance, is about the
intersecting, on a winter day, of the lives of a boy whose physical description
says everything about his social status — “a pale boy with unfortunate Prince
Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms” — and a man dying of cancer, who has
decided to kill himself by going to the park and taking off his clothes and
freezing to death, thus sparing his family the suffering and raging and
degradation that’s sure to come.
“If death is in the room, it’s pretty interesting,”
Saunders said, meaning that any story circling around the idea of death is
going to be charged. “But I would also say that I’m interested in getting
myself to believe that it’s going to happen to me. I’m interested in it,
because if you’re not, you’re nuts. It’s really de facto what we’re here to
find out about. I hate the thought of messing around and then being like, ‘Oh,
I’ve got pancreatic cancer.’ It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to even think of.
But to me, it’s what you should be thinking about all the time. As a fiction
writer, the trick is how to be thinking about it in a way that makes it
substantial. You want it to matter when you do induce it.”
I asked him about the occasional dramatization in
his stories of the moments after death, the way characters’ lives are sometimes
suddenly reframed and redeemed. “In terms of dramatic structure, I don’t really
buy the humanist verities anymore,” he said. “I mean, I buy them, they’re a
subset of what’s true. But they’re not sufficient. They wouldn’t do much for me
on my deathbed. Look at it another way. We’re here. We’re nice guys. We’re
doing O.K. But we know that in X number of years, we won’t be here, and between
now and then something unpleasant is gonna happen, or at least potentially
unpleasant and scary. And when we turn to try and understand that, I don’t
really think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be
crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed
to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky?
Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no
way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing
everything. The idea of saying, ‘Well, we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need
to see it,’ seems really weird to me.”
Saunders has taught in
the graduate writing program at Syracuse for 16 years. I spent a couple of days
sitting in on his classes, a small five-student workshop and a “forms” class,
which on the day I was there was focused on the nature of revision;
specifically, on a handful of Raymond Carver stories and the fraught relationship
between Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish. The students seemed really sharp,
and Saunders is clearly committed to them. “With this caliber of student, you
have to be really honest,” he told me. “It keeps you looking at your own
process, so you don’t import any nonsense.” In an interview several years ago
with Ben Marcus for The Believer, Saunders defended the time spent in an M.F.A.
program by saying, “The chances of a person breaking through their own habits
and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and
matters to people are slim.” But it’s a mistake, he added, to think of writing
programs in terms that are “too narrowly careerist. . . . Even for those
thousands of young people who don’t get something out there, the process is
still a noble one — the process of trying to say something, of working through
craft issues and the worldview issues and the ego issues — all of this is
character-building, and, God forbid, everything we do should have concrete
career results. I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of
trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.”
After finishing up with his student conferences,
Saunders gave me a quick literary tour of Syracuse — Toni Morrison’s old
neighborhood; Tobias Wolff’s house (where Saunders and his wife, Paula, and
their daughters lived after Wolff left Syracuse to teach at Stanford); the
little place where a sober Raymond Carver made his life with the poet Tess
Gallagher. We drove to the end of a block and Saunders pointed out a run-down
house with a basement apartment that had a couple of small, dark windows and a
broken concrete patio. It was a grim-looking spot. “That’s where Dave wrote
‘Infinite Jest,’ ” he said. “There should be a plaque there.”
He and Paula now live just outside of Oneonta, N.Y.,
two hours southeast of Syracuse. Their house sits on 15 acres, up a hill at the
end of a rocky drive. It’s a beautiful place. There’s a koi pond and, because
they devote a significant part of their lives to the practice of Nyingma
Buddhism, there are statues of the Buddha here and there and colored prayer
flags strung in the woods.
Saunders writes in a shed across the driveway from
his house, where we sat for a couple hours one morning while his two yellow
labs nosed around outside the door. There’s the desk and a sofa and a table
stacked with books that he has been researching for his next project. On the
shelves there are pictures of him and Paula and the girls and a great one from
his jazz-fusion days of him playing a Fender Telecaster, with white-blond
Johnny Winter hair to his shoulders. “In our lives, we’re many people,” he said
as he lifted the photo off the shelf.
We talked for a while about his relationship to
Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working
similar themes, they were, Saunders said, “like two teams of miners, digging at
the same spot but from different directions.” He described making trips to New
York in the early days and having “three or four really intense afternoons and
evenings” with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus,
talking to each of them about what “the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.”
Saunders added: “The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make
it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were
about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort
of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while
(2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.”
“Those guys came from a much better trained place,”
he said. “They had a very strong and passionate involvement with postmodernism
when it was still hot off the griddle.” Whereas, for him the question wasn’t
how to move beyond the postmodern fathers who shaped current American literary
sensibility; it was how “to mimic the emotional conditions of my actual working
life” — how to, as he later put it, arrive at a voice that was informed by “the
mild ass-kickings” he suffered or witnessed in his adult life “that had the
effect of politicizing and tenderizing me.”
His dad owned a pizza restaurant in Amarillo, Tex.,
after having run a couple of places in Chicago called Chicken Unlimited. While
Saunders was in college, studying geophysical engineering at the Colorado
School of Mines, the restaurant burned down. Because of a quirk in the
insurance coverage, his family lost the restaurant. Soon afterward the family
moved from Amarillo to New Mexico, where his father set up a support facility
engaged with CO2-recovery stations for oil rigs. “I remember it being 20 below
outside, and the pipes in our mobile home froze,” Saunders said, “and my dad
was out there in just a Windbreaker with a blow torch, trying to unfreeze
them.”
After he graduated from the School of Mines,
Saunders went to work for an oil-exploration company in the jungles of Sumatra.
“I was trained in seismic prospecting,” he said. “We’d drill a deep hole and
put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a
cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.”
They worked four weeks on and two weeks off and in the down time would be
shuttled in helicopters to the nearest city, 40 minutes away, and then from
there fly to Singapore.
“I’d been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that,” he
said. “And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and
genuinely suffering and hadn’t gotten there by whining.” While on a break in
Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by
an excavation site and “saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And
then I realized the shadows were old women, working the night shift. Oh, I
thought, Ayn Rand doesn’t quite account for this.”
Whenever he was on leave, he would stock up on weeks
worth of books to read. “This was serious business,” he wrote in an essay
called “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,” which appears in “The Braindead Megaphone.”
“If the books ran out before the four weeks did, I would be reduced to reading
the same 1979 Playboy over and over, and/or watching hours ofwayang theater
on the bunkhouse television.”
On one of those trips, Saunders picked up
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” though at that point in his life he had “read virtually
nothing” and didn’t really know what to make of it, as it didn’t conform to his
sense at the time that “great writing was hard reading.”
Eventually he got sick from swimming in a river
infested with monkey feces and came home. He spent the next two years, as he
put it, “trying to be ecstatic like Kerouac and ‘understand America.’ ” There
was a woman in Chicago he had been crazy about but always felt was out of his
reach, but now, having traveled in Asia and returned and being on the verge of
living the life of the writer, “whatever my immature and arrogant idea of that
was, I went to her and said, ‘Stick with me.’ ” They moved to L.A., “me and
this girl I was supposed to be showing the world to, and I couldn’t find work,”
Saunders said. “We were at the bottom.” So they fled Los Angeles and went back to
Chicago, where Saunders lived in his aunt’s basement and got a job working as a
roofer. He wrote a remarkable essay about that time and the end of that
relationship, “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” years ago for The New Yorker.
“Finally, in terms of money, I got it,” he wrote. “Money forestalled disgrace.”
In 1985, Saunders was
accepted into the graduate writing program at Syracuse based on a story of his
called “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room.” “It was wild, it was
funny,” he said. “But I repented of it. It was modern, and I wanted to be in
1932. I wanted to be Hemingway.” In his author’s note for the reissue of
“CivilWarLand,” he writes: “If I got tired of [Hemingway], I did a Carver
imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel lived in
Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil
fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in
Syracuse, which, to me, sounded like Carver.”
He met Paula, who was also in the writing program,
shortly after he arrived in Syracuse. They were engaged after three weeks and
Paula became pregnant seven months later, on their honeymoon. “We went from
being young Carver-acolyte beatniks to Ozzie and Harriet in what felt like a
week,” he said. “Well, Ozzie and Harriet if they were broke.” In 1989, when
their daughter Caitlin was 1, they moved to Rochester so Saunders could work as
a technical writer for the Radian Corporation. Their second daughter, Alena,
was born a year later. With both daughters, Paula went into labor at five
months and had to go on complete bed rest. At one point their car broke down,
and Saunders biked back and forth to work along the Erie Canal in a
cold-weather moon suit cobbled together from “a set of lab goggles, a rain
poncho, some high rubber boots that I seem to remember had little spacemen on
them.”
If it’s possible to locate the exact moment when
George Saunders became George Saunders, it’s right around here. “I was so
terrified by that L.A. experience,” he said, “I couldn’t imagine getting to
that place with Paula and the girls. So I took the Radian job, and it was a
very liberating thing. If I can provide for them, then in my writing time I can
be as wild as I want. Having felt that abyss, I basically said, ‘O.K., capitalism,
I have seen your gaping maw, and I want no trouble with you.’ ”
For the last couple of years he’d been working on
what he described as a “disastrous novel” — “La Boda de Eduardo” — but he
realized, with the force of epiphany, that the attempts to graft his life
experience onto a Hemingway-Carver framework were foolish. There was an
experience he was living that hadn’t adequately been represented in fiction
yet. Not a Kafkaesque existential deadness, but something else, something that
captured “not the endless cycle of meaningless activity but the endless cycle
of meaningful activity.”
“I saw the peculiar way America creeps up on you if
you don’t have anything,” he told me. “It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do
have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now
the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored.
Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel
the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in
order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more
years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an
intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that
wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the
cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.”
The lesson he learned was the thing he sensed all
those years ago in Sumatra, reading but not fully grasping Vonnegut. “I began
to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters,” Saunders wrote in
an essay on Vonnegut. “He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The
writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear
resemblance to ‘real life’ — he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s
important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader
between entry and exit. . . . In fact, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ seemed to be
saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling
from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be
greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it.”
There’s a story in
the new book called “The Semplica Girl Diaries” that took him more than a dozen
years to write. It’s narrated in a series of journal entries by a man who has
just turned 40 and is struggling to erect what paltry defenses he can against
the shame of not providing more for his family. (From one entry, which struck
me, caught as I tend to be in a web of financial neuroses and class anxiety, as
chest-achingly true: “Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t
be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad. . . . Have to do better! Be kinder.
Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory of you is testy
stressed guy in bad car.”) The Semplica Girls of the title are women from
various third-world countries (Moldova, Somalia, Laos, etc.) who have applied
to come to America and get paid to decorate the lawns of the wealthy, by being
strung aloft, in flowing white gowns, on a microline that runs through their
brains. Through them — through the acquisition of them — the narrator hopes to
elevate his family’s status and bring his kids joy.
It’s one of a handful of Saunders’s stories that
originated in a dream. “I went to a window that didn’t exist in our house, and
I looked into the yard, and I saw a row of what I understood in the dream logic
to be third-world women who had a wire through their heads,” he said. “Instead
of horror, my reaction was like, ‘Yeah, we did it.’ Just like if you’d gotten a
new car or a kid into school or something, that feeling of, I’ve come such a
long way, I’m able to give these things to my family. And there was a sense
that there was an alleviated shame.”
“Semplica Girls” is a perfect illustration of the
point where Saunders the technically experimental wizard and Saunders the guy
whose heart exists outside of his body converge. It’s science fiction of the
highest order. The unreality has been rendered on the page in completely
convincing and compelling detail, but it’s also a story about domestic
yearning, and a story about oppression and injustice and the complicated ripple
effects of global capitalism. In an interview on The New Yorker’s Web site with
Deborah Treisman, his editor there, Saunders explained the challenge of the
story this way: “Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious,
but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well,
which means that the reader will also know it — and so things have to be ramped
up. . . . These sorts of thematic challenges are, for me, anyway, only
answerable via the line-by-line progress through the story. Trying to figure
out what happens next, and in what language. So, in this case, I just started
out by trying to get the guy to that window, in his underwear, having that same
feeling.”
In another story “Escape From Spiderhead,” the
narrator is being held in a prison-research facility where he and the other inmates
are being used as human guinea pigs to test the effects of new drugs. The
pharmaceutical names are pure Saunders: Verbaluce, for eloquence of thought and
speech; Vivistif, for what you would imagine; and Darkenfloxx. “Imagine the
worst you have ever felt, times 10. That does not even come close to how bad
you feel on Darkenfloxx.”
The story is concerned with the question of suicide
and the struggle to get free of your own mind. I mentioned to Saunders that it
reminded me of David Foster Wallace, and he said that he wasn’t consciously
writing about Wallace, but he was thinking about him a lot during the writing
of that story and others in the new book. “ ‘Tenth of December’ has the same
overtones,” he said. “But if you notice it” — meaning, if you find yourself
making a comment about suicide — “you run away from it and just focus on inhabiting
the story and the character as intensely as you can.
“I admired him so much,” he said about Wallace. “His
on-the-spot capabilities were just incredible. And I thought, Yeah, we’re a lot
alike. We’re similar, nervous guys. And then when he died, I thought [of
myself], Wait a minute, you’re not like that. You don’t have chronic, killing
depression. I’m sad sometimes, but I’m not depressed. And I also have a
mawkish, natural enthusiasm for things. I like being alive in a way that’s a
little bit cheerleaderish, and I always felt that around Dave. When he died, I
saw how unnegotiable it was, that kind of depression. And it led to my being a
little more honest about one’s natural disposition. If you have a negative
tendency and you deny it, then you’ve doubled it. If you have a negative
tendency and you look at it” — which is, in part, what the process of writing
allows — “then the possibility exists that you can convert it.”
The last time we
met, Saunders waited in the cold with me until the bus for New York came along.
We were talking about the idea of abiding, of the way that you can help people
flourish just by withholding judgment, if you open yourself up to their
possibilities, as Saunders put it, just as you would open yourself up to a
story’s possibilities. We said goodbye, and I got on the bus. It was dark now,
and you couldn’t really see the other passengers. I had “The Braindead
Megaphone” with me, and I turned on my little light and reread a story he did
several years ago for GQ, about traveling to Dubai. “In all things,” he wrote,
“we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. . . . The universal human
laws — need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the
kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of fear/hunger/pain — are
constant, predictable. . . . What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own
desires are mappable onto strangers.”
At the risk of hyperbole at the end of a story that
began in a state of fairly high exaltation, I would say that this is precisely
the effect that Saunders’s fiction has on you. It “softens the borders,” as he
put it in one of our conversations. “Between you and me, between me and me,
between the reader and the writer.” It makes you wiser, better, more
disciplined in your openness to the experience of other people. The guy talking
on the bus about how his girlfriend doesn’t appreciate his music and why
couldn’t she just cut him that much slack, seeing how he just did all that
time? The couple in the basement of the Port Authority, the wife helping her
husband get into his Grover costume before he stepped out onto 42nd Street. The
woman, one recent morning, who screamed at panhandlers on the subway that it
was the day after Christmas and why couldn’t they just give us all some peace?
“Peace on Earth,” she hollered. “Is that so much to ask for? Get off the
train.” She went on for a while, and some other passengers started to turn on
her. “I’m right!” she yelled. “I’m right.” And then her face took on the
saddest expression.
It’s hard to maintain, the softness. It’s an effort.
That Dubai story ends with these lines, wisdom imparted from Saunders to
himself: “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused.
Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up
some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
Joel
Lovell is a deputy editor of the magazine. Editor: Adam Sternbergh A version of this article appeared in print
on January 6, 2013, on page MM23 of the Sunday Magazine with
the headline: ‘Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts'.
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