Dragging The Future Back Through The Past, Like A Rotting Donkey On A Grand Piano

Check it out, FLAPPERHOUSE was interviewed by a real-live Interviewer!

Interviewer: FLAPPERHOUSE has described itself as “Dragging the future back through the past, like a rotting donkey on a grand piano.”

FLAPPERHOUSE: Chien! Andalusia! We are un!

Interviewer: Precisely. And by “the past,” more specifically you mean circa the 1920′s?

FLAPPERHOUSE: Yes and no. Mostly yes. We do think the future should have much more futurism. But with much less fascism. We’d also like to see more surrealism, expressionism, dadaism, psychological horror, and, of course, modernism.

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If The Sentences Are Jangly…

George Saunders talks method with Charlie Rose. Notes to self: Don’t go in with any idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, and don’t try to be Hemingway. 

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Back From The Edge Of Surrender: George Saunders’ Tenth Of December

Martin Ansin’s illustration for George Saunders’ short story, “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” The New Yorker, October 15th, 2012

I’ve just finished Tenth Of December and it’s reaffirmed my belief that George Saunders is my favorite living writer, a title he’s held since shortly after the death of Kurt Vonnegut.  Granted, I’d already read a few of the stories in this latest collection, but those were even better the second time, especially “Escape From Spiderhead.”

Saunders can still crack me up with his futuristic pharmaceuticals and endearingly irrational everymen, like in “My Chivalric Fiasco.”  And he can still devastate me like a ball of lightning to the gut.  “Puppy” is particularly crushing, even though it exploits the ultra-easy sympathy-squeezer of an adorable dog-in-peril; the story’s transcendent thanks to some well-woven dramatic irony, and an unimpeachable eye for detail (an upper-middle-class character seems somewhere between fascinated and appalled by the clutter in a less-fortunate character’s house: “some kind of crankshaft on a cookie sheet… a partial red pepper afloat in a can of green paint.”)  Tenth Of December‘s title story is also a killer, bringing us to the edge of surrender right before it flips us around and fills us with the urge to clutch everything we hold dear and sob with gratitude.

I can get why some readers might see a lack of cohesion in Saunders’ collections, which tend to oscillate between realism and surrealism without warning.  But me, I’m used to it, and it all makes perfect nonsense.  Saunders’ surrealism illuminates realities I wasn’t consciously aware of, and his realism feels like it could explode into surrealism at any moment.

If anything about Tenth Of December feels out of place to me, it’s the cover.  It has none of the oddball imagery of past Saunders covers, opting instead for black-and-white minimalism.

Tenth Of December‘s cover certainly has thematic significance, symbolizing the title story’s dangerous divide between solid white ice and the deadly dark water below.  But it also feels like an extra-conscious effort (probably on the part of the publishers) to steer Saunders’ work into more mainstream territory.  And hey, it seems to be working.  Saunders has been beloved for a while, but now it’s like he’s American Fiction’s It Boy.  It’s about damn time.

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Personal Favorites: George Saunders’ “Escape From Spiderhead”

I’m so freaking jealous of George Saunders.  He comes up with these sci-fi scenarios that are both perfectly logical and hilariously insane, and he fleshes them out with raw, powerful emotion.  It’s not fair.  “Escape From Spiderhead” is yet another perfect example of his talent:

“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.

“What’s in it?” I said.

“Hilarious,” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.

I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.

“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”

Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Drip on?” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

Continue reading George Saunders’ “Escape From Spiderhead”

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