Reading these stories, it gets under your skin. It’s with you if you read before sleep, and again on waking in the morning. The forced-immigrant SGs with their wires through the brain, strung as ornaments in suburban gardens, and the poor journal narrator whose speech devolves into ESL-speak… the victims of Abnesti’s MobiPak with its drip of various artificial hormones… these are stories not about technology but about what it is to be human. Saunders displays a perfect ear for style and nuance of particular speech, corporate talk or the layman’s lingo – and these qualities stand out more than the appeal of any hardware per se. The premise of each story and character situation serves the larger purpose of illuminating the human drama… internal, social, economic, political, and technological as well as existential.
These stories let us appreciate with empathy those who happen to wear other skins. It brings our consciousness across boundaries of self, entertaining in novelty of situation and voice and combination of intrigue, new wrinkles of conflict and strategy to resolve. This sport is called life, the gameboard reset in each lifetime or, on a smaller scale, each story captured in the frame of art. The plot is the playing of the game itself, from first moves to final resolution, and the challenges and crises along the way, by which the outcome might turn out better or worse for the side we are following. Or we could watch, more dispassionate, for the beauty of the game itself, the artful play of the contest.
The plots, while captivating at the time with the dramas of each set of characters, aren’t really the point, or the worlds they are describing, but rather the characters themselves playing out each plot twist: the Alzeimer patient and the deranged kid trying to save each other, the war veteran about to kill his family if they don’t accept him with love which how could they?
I am struck most by the language, and the way it fits each character perfectly, as well as generally capturing the distinctive flavor of contemporary American speech. Or has Saunders somehow tapped into a universal vein of knowledge of all people and their particularities of speech?
The thing is to get so totally inside the head and world of such characters so that their unique (yet universal) situations are conveyed as they must be by that flavor of speech which is the flavor of that bundle of thought, conditioning, desire and limitation. This characterization through language styling is the nub of Saunders’ technique – if you could even call it technique, for it possesses that mastery that renders it transparent, integrated in the virtual experience of the story, its whole cloth. The plot is just a vehicle – as life is – for character to reveal itself, for soul to manifest its necessary drama.
George Saunders, Tenth of December
