The length of the piece allows Saunders to work with repetition. At the close of every day, the caveman must fax his evaluation of Janet to head office. This becomes the coda to each chapter:
Do I note any attitudinal difficulties? I do not. How do I rate my Partner overall? Very good. Are there any Situations which require Mediation?
There are not.
I fax it in.
When the character finally does betray Janet, this coda changes, and the change ripples right through the story. ‘Pastoralia’ is Saunders at his best, demonstrating the inextricable link between narrative and rhythm in his work. When I read this collection for the first time I was overwhelmed by a sense of possibility. I would never write like Saunders – one has to be content with one’s limits, one’s style, apparently imposed from without – but reading him always makes me feel how spacious art can be. How free it is to be a writer.
In the same year that he published Pastoralia, Saunders published a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. It tells the story of a girl named Capable who is ground down by her 24-hour job brushing gappers (small, prickly, spherical creatures that scream) from the backs of her goats. Gappers love goats, and when you brush them off and throw them into the sea, it will only be a few hours before they have inched along the seabed and up the steep cliffs of Frip, across the paddocks, and onto the backs of the goats, whose milk is the town’s only source of income. Goats won’t produce milk if they are covered in screaming gappers. Capable wins against the odds, just as she should – odds that include a useless father, a dead mother, and a set of horrible neighbours – and The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, which is both funny and madly inventive, is that rare thing: a children’s book written by an author of books for adults that satisfies both audiences.
What we begin to see in The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a determined hopefulness in Saunders’ work: the weak begin to have the smallest of inklings about their own agency. We start to see more of Saunders’ characters winning against the odds. These victories are not always as obvious as Capable’s, but they generally involve characters finding a kind of inner strength, or seeing the positive in their lives. Most importantly, they successfully articulate this to themselves. This is exemplified in the character of the grandfather in ‘My Flamboyant Grandson’, from In Persuasion Nation. The unnamed grandfather sins against state power by removing his shoes, which have in-built Everly Strips, designed to receive mandatory advertising from the Everly Readers running along every sidewalk. His shoes are hurting his feet, and he and his isolated, theatrical, ‘flamboyant’ grandson are late for a Broadway show. The story finishes after the show, which has changed the grandson’s life, and after the grandfather has willingly undergone disciplining for removing his Everly Strips: a session in which he is forced to repeatedly Celebrate his Preferences. He finishes by saying to us, about his grandson:
He looks like no one else, acts like no one else, his clothes are increasingly like plumage, late at night he choreographs using plastic Army men, he fits no mold and has no friends, but I believe in my heart that someday something beautiful may come from him.
The short story is about form – less so than the poem, but more so than the novel. Endings should be fundamental. Their job is not so much resolution; a short-story ending wants to somehow emphasise or echo the quality of the story, as though a story’s voice, in its dying fall, can remind us of everything we have just read. Even an airy, apparently open ending, like those in the stories of Lydia Davis or Alice Munro, is a way of saying ‘this is what my story is about’.
Saunders’ stories often say my story is about hope or my story is about goodness. And why not? Saunders is a self-described optimist, and there is real pleasure to be had in his empathy and optimism for his unfortunate characters. But it is possible to see this manoeuvre in Saunders’ work as technically limiting. In ‘Home’, from Tenth of December, a young man comes back from either Iraq or Afghanistan to the miserable chaos he created before he left. He is now suffering from war trauma, as well as a horrible childhood and a broken marriage. As he approaches his family, standing terrified on a porch, ‘The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.’ Brilliant, and very scary. But then he gives way, the contours shrink to include only his own disaster, his own unhappy collapse. The family is saved. This is absolutely possible, and very heartening to read. But if it happens this way too many times we start to feel suspicious, a little manipulated.
An example of this triumph of formal convenience over reality comes at the end of ‘Christmas’, an autobiographical story from In Persuasion Nation. It is about the time Saunders spent living in his aunt and uncle’s basement and making a very small amount of money as a very incompetent roofer. Saunders calmly and compassionately describes the men he worked with, particularly John, a father of fourteen children, who silently suffers racial taunts and cruelty from those who employ him. In the final scene, all the men, including Saunders, gather for a Christmas party, bringing out their Christmas pay and bonuses to gamble with. Rick, the foulest of them all, gradually wins all of John’s money from him. No presents, then, for John’s wife or his fourteen children. Saunders finishes: ‘I… was once a joke of a roofer, a joke of a roofer so beat down he stood by watching as a nice man got cheated out of his Christmas.’
Well, yes, I want to say – but then, no. It isn’t my business to know the truth of this situation or to judge its protagonist. But I can see here where the need to end on a note of resolution has forced Saunders into a judgement about his own moral cowardice that closes down other narrative possibilities. The exigencies of narrative, the kind of pressure exerted on all those who would write, demand that we end somewhere, and this ending seems neat enough. But this particular ending does not do everything that Saunders can and does do in stories like ‘Sea Oak’ and ‘Pastoralia’, in which you feel the story somehow extending beyond the ending, as though you’ve had a privileged glimpse into a life that will go on whether you are there or not.
Anyone who has written knows the feeling of the hand behind the back, forcing your story in a particular direction. Saunders’ writing shows signs of this; once we have noticed it, it is possible to feel his stories locking into place after a few paragraphs. Not all of them succumb to this pressure, and Tenth of December contains some of his best work.
But still, it feels as though there is somewhere else George Saunders’ stories could go – that there is some unchallenged assumption he has, some unmined psychic difficulty, that could provide a new vein of narrative, a new impulse for his work. His apparently limitless powers of invention don’t always extend beyond this narrative of ‘hope’ or ‘goodness’. After this collection I found myself wishing that he would choose the road less travelled; that he might frighten himself with the psychological possibilities of the situations he sets up.
* * *
In 2017 I was given the chance to meet Saunders, chairing a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival that consisted of him and two other, almost comically different short story writers. You can imagine how I felt. I had already chaired sessions with Jonathan Franzen (an experience so terrifying to contemplate – Franzen is notorious for being impossible to interview – that I thought I might faint as I walked down towards the Roslyn Packer Theatre, my heart unleashing ribbons of beats that I could feel in my head, my legs), James Wood and Helen Garner, people whose work meant as much to me as any real, human relationship. But experience did not make it easier.
As I’d rather suspected he would be, Saunders was about the nicest person I’d ever met. Only met: I didn’t spend any length of time with him, didn’t become friends with him, although he was immensely friendly. As we sat on stage, watching the crowd file in, I pointed out my father in his front-row seat. Saunders immediately waved at him, and on receiving a wave in return, jerked his thumb at me and called to Dad, ‘Good kid!’ (This, when I was forty-eight!) As the session opened, he sw
ivelled his body around to face the two other writers, both women. When they spoke, he leaned forward, chin on hand, concentrating hard. If asked a question, he deferred to them first. Even at the time, my heart beating in my head, he made me think irresistibly of the two Canadian farmers in ‘Sea Oak’ who, on meeting the main characters when they have a flat tyre, insist ‘on fixing it, then springing for dinner, then starting a college fund for the babies’.
He willingly signed my beaten-up copy of Pastoralia, for me and for Russell. Later, I looked at the front page: ‘To Tegan and Michael. Thanks for teaching these!’ Even the most generous of practising Buddhists cannot be present in every moment.
Previous to 2017, Saunders was under-read in Australia. He’d never been here, and while he wasn’t entirely unknown, it was still possible to spend a day asking people if they’d read him and find that none had – or only those you’d excitedly pressed his books on. However, a review of Saunders in an American publication carried the tacit understanding that the writer was some kind of genius, evinced not just by the astonishing originality of his prose and his numerous awards, including an actual ‘Genius Grant’ – a MacArthur Fellowship, also awarded to his friend David Foster Wallace – but by the mixture of love and awe he inspired in his fellow writers. Jonathan Franzen said he ‘makes the all-but-impossible look effortless’, Lorrie Moore that ‘there is no one like him’, and Wallace himself is recorded as ‘standing in the hall [of Harper’s magazine offices] in his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer in America’.
When we met, Saunders had not yet won the Man Booker with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. But there were enough people at the session to tell me what I already knew: that Lincoln in the Bardo was going to bring Saunders to a much, much wider audience. The novel was unlike any other published in 2017, and not much like any other novel ever published. Like the cartographers who create maps the size of the countries they represent in the Borges story ‘Exactitude in Science’, one needs a novel’s worth of words to do it justice.
The conceit is this: the son of Abraham Lincoln, Willie, has died and is in a crypt in a graveyard in Washington. In the two or three days following his death, Lincoln comes several times to the graveyard, slides the coffin from the crypt, and holds the boy in his arms. This actually happened.
The characters in the novel are the dead souls who inhabit the graveyard, and Willie is now one of them. However, each of the characters has a problem, which will become the novel’s driving concern: they do not know, or will not accept, that they are dead. They are in a fictionalised version of the Tibetan bardo, a middle world where consciousness lingers after death, not having yet fled to its new form – hence the book’s dreadful title.
None of this, though, is directly explained in the prose itself. All Saunders’ stories begin where stories should – with a voice – but the owner of this voice is generally in conversation with themselves, and not with us. Don’t expect exposition, scene-setting, or a list of key characters. It’s as though, sitting on a bus, or in a graveyard, or walking through the offices of a minor corporation, we can suddenly hear the inner voices of the people around us. They are all attempting to rewrite their lives, to narrate a self more interesting, more attractive, more able than the one they are stuck with. Sometimes they chant mantras borrowed from charlatan self-help gurus, or get through difficult situations by practising their ‘Hatred Abatement Breathing’.
Lincoln in the Bardo opens with the voice of Hans Vollman, a nineteenth-century man, talking about his late marriage to a much younger woman, who was not unnaturally terrified of their wedding night. Seeing her terror, Vollman promised he would keep his distance. They would be friends only, and no-one would be the wiser. His gentleness and generosity were rewarded – after a time his young wife left him a note suggesting that they ‘expand the frontiers of our happiness’. Vollman was thrilled; longing for their meeting in bed, he went to work in his printing shop in a state of exalted anticipation. But alas (and here the voice begins to fragment):
A beam from the ceiling came down, hitting me just here… and so our plan must be deferred, while I recovered. Per the advice of my physician, I took to my – A sort of sick-box was judged – was judged to be –
And here the interjection of another voice:
Efficacious.
roger bevins iii
Efficacious, yes. Thank you, friend.
hans vollman
This is our introduction – to the central idea of the story; to the story’s style, which is much like the script of a play, spoken largely in the voices of these two characters; and to its very particular language. The ‘sick-box’ isn’t for the sick but for the dead – it’s a coffin. But each of the people we meet in the graveyard is someone who has chosen to reject this. They are only waiting to recover, so that they can return to their lives and their families. Just as with the characters in Saunders’ short stories, their every speech is given in an effort to convince themselves of a more comfortable fiction.
Willie Lincoln died of typhoid, in circumstances terrible for his parents, Abraham and Mary. The night of his death, a long-planned reception was held in the White House. The Lincolns came and went, visiting Willie’s sickbed and then assuming party manners for the hundreds of people downstairs. Exposition becomes necessary here, for Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III can’t be expected to know this; they’ve been dead some time, they don’t know the name of the current president, and they’re yet to meet Willie. Nor do they know that the Civil War is raging, and that its outcome is uncertain. Saunders solves this puzzle by composing chapters that are made from fragments of other texts; in most cases real books, like the famous Thirty Years a Slave by Elizabeth Keckley, who was Mary Todd Lincoln’s dresser and close friend. These patchwork chapters first impress as another example of Saunders’ ceaseless invention: posed a problem, the author rises to solve it with yet another formal innovation.
But as the novel goes on, and these expositional chapters contain more and longer fragments that we know (after careful googling) to be inventions of the author’s, this device becomes a hindrance to Saunders’ style, slowing him down. It makes the book feel just slightly mechanical, deliberate where the rest of Saunders’ work feels brilliantly involuntary.
Chapter four opens in the voice of Roger Bevins III, who, we learn, had a ‘certain predilection’, and who, after a rejection from his one-time lover Gilbert, decided to kill himself. However, with wrists slashed, and blood everywhere, he realised that life was in fact beautiful, a ‘grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing’. He staggered down to the kitchen to find help, and thinks he is there still, waiting to be saved by a servant. In fact he has bled to death. Meanwhile the beautiful multiplicity of life continues to manifest in his speech:
a sleeping dog dream-kicking in a tree-shade triangle; a sugar pyramid upon a blackwood tabletop being rearranged grain-by-grain by an indiscernible draft
This multiplicity also manifests in his form – Willie Lincoln, just arrived, sees:
several sets of eyes All darting to and fro All sniffing His hands (he had multiple sets of hands or else his hands were so quick they seemed to be many) struck this way and that, picking things up, bringing them to his face with a most inquisitive
Little bit scary
willie lincoln
The rules of this invented world require that a child does not stay in the bardo; as Roger Bevins III puts it, ‘These young ones are not meant to tarry.’ But Willie insists that he has to wait – he feels it – and then we meet Abraham Lincoln himself, who comes to the crypt, takes Willie’s coffin from its place, and holds his son in his arms. Poor Willie is frantic. He tries to show his father that he is here, not in his body, and he stands next to him, ‘uttering many urgent entreaties for his father to look his way, fuss over and pat him’. Finally he enters Lincoln’s body and is able to feel his father’s grief.
In the following cha
pters the central narrative begins to come together. There’s a new happiness amongst the dead souls, who feel recognised at last – all have been left behind by their living, but here is a living person who has come to see them. They begin to gather around Lincoln, bringing their multitude of stories with them. Dead slaves begin to make an appearance, animating the plot and the material further, passing through Lincoln and feeling his commitment to their liberation. Lincoln begins to shift from real person to central metaphor – he starts to function, literally and figuratively, as a vessel for these neglected people and their stories.
The great pleasure to be had in reading this novel is embodied in the character of Roger Bevins III, ceaselessly reproducing his sensory organs in order to experience more of the world. Saunders himself seems able to see and feel everything and everyone – and each character in Lincoln in the Bardo, however small their part, rises off the page fully formed, speaking in a voice that sounds immediately authentic. Here is Saunders’ astoundingly tuned ear at work. One of the novel’s walk-on characters is a white woman who, in dying, has had to leave her three daughters with a boorish, thoughtless husband. They need her:
Cathryn is soon to begin school. Who will make sure her clothes are correct? Maribeth has a bad foot and is self-conscious and often comes home in tears. To whom will she cry? Alice is nervous, for she has submitted a poem. It is not a very good poem.
Another is Litzie, a slave, who cannot speak, but shakes, and whose story is narrated by her companions:
What was done to her was done to her many times, by many… what was done to her was done by big men, small men, boss men, men who happened to be passing the field in which she worked, the teen sons of the boss man or of the men who happened to be passing, a trio of men on a bender who spilled out of the house and, just before departing, saw her there chopping wood… what was done to her was: whatever anyone wished to do, and even if someone wished only slightly to do something to her, well, one could do it, it could be done, one did it, it was done and done and –
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