"The Tenth of December" by George Saunders

[Barbara]

Our next short story is "The Tenth of December" by George Saunders. You can find it in our anthology, The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction and also (thank you, Sheila!) on the New Yorker website at
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20... That link doesn't seem to be behind a paywall so I think everyone can access it. It is also part of his short story collection with the same title, Tenth of December.

George Saunders is pretty well known, at least here in the U.S., but he has a good website at https://georgesaundersbooks.com/. There is also a surprisingly good Wikipedia article about him.

First of all, I need to say that I am incredibly surprised at how much I loved this story. I've had a prejudice against Saunders' writing for a while. I think I must've read some of his early stuff and decided that he was too self-consciously clever for me. I've had a problem with that kind of writing for a while and, unfortunately, put him into a cubbyhole. When we read Lincoln in the Bardo here on CR and I also loved that, I began to suspect that there might be something more to this writer than I had imagined and this confirms it.

I was telling my husband the plot of this story as I was reading it and he finally said, "This is a short story?!?" And, I agree. Saunders somehow gave us a novel, or at least a novella, in short story form. I had a pretty full idea of who these characters were, not only the main ones but the mom, wife and kids. And, somehow, he was also able to inject humor in a story about a nerdy little outcast of a boy and a man who is dying of a brain tumor.

What did you think of the ending? I can imagine some people saying that it was too pat, that a man who had decided to kill himself wouldn't change his mind that quickly. But, I had the feeling that the he rediscovered the man he truly was. And, I loved his description of fighting and making up in a committed relationship: "...they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he'd ever ----...."

[Lynn]

I thought this sounded familiar. Do you remember when the short story collection was a Reading List selection in 2013?
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Barbara]

Oh my gosh! And I was surprised at how much I liked all of those stories then! Maybe it’s good that my memory is so bad. I get to enjoy things like new all over again. Thanks, Lynn.

[Lynn]

I think that's one of the happier ways to look at aging, Barb :)

[Theresa]

Barb, it's not that your memory is bad, it's just you have lived longer and have so much more to remember!! I'm looking forward to reading this one soon.

Theresa

[Sheila]

I hadn’t read any of his work before and am curious on the one hand and put off on the other. For me the story was over long, it took too long to get going. At the beginning I was confused as to who it was about - the boy or the man and why so many people were being reference. Once Saunders brought the two people together, it took off. I liked the way he wrote the internal monologue of the man in the final section. I read it a a rediscovery of his reason for living, an renewed appreciation of those that mattered in his life, although I don’t agree with his analysis that ending one’s life is selfish and that is therefore a reason not to do it in such circumstances. I see it more as our final choice and people ought to respect it, either way. For the man, circumstance’s with the boy made him reassess his.
Overall still a bit ambivalent

[Barbara]

I’m glad you found your way back to the short story conference, Steve. You were always a stalwart in this little group back in the day.

Yes, 10 degrees is very, very cold, particularly a wet 10 degrees. I remember my days outside in it as a kid in central Indiana. Saunders dramatized that by making the kid’s clothes frozen solid when he got out of the water. But, I agree with you that he is really asking us to accept a lot when he has a cancer patient in his underwear walk out of the woods and survive. However, he had me so invested in these 2 characters that I accepted it.

I definitely think Allen had dementia of some kind. Even though I was pretty sure that Don had a brain tumor, the parallels between the 2 of them worked — two good men who hated what they were doing to those they loved.

Sheila, both characters had conversations going with other people in their heads until they came upon each other. Saunders did identify them but it was a lot to take in. I thought it helped establish who they were as people.

[Sheila]

welcome back to short stories Steve.
I automatically took it to be 10F being US which is cold enough, and 10C wouldn’t have caused ice. I also thought Allen had Alzheimers although I have no direct experience of this
The frozen solid clothes image made me think of growing up in Scotland when winters were colder for longer and the washing on the line froze solid in the wind. Towels like tablets of stone. Winters past.
Barb, I think you got why I didn’t get the opening sections. It wasn’t clear to me the boy was taking to himself.

[Sheila]

Steve, just in case you hadn’t picked up on the fact I am away from home for all of April, hence my replies are short via a phone or tablet which I hate typing on compared to a proper key board when at home. More time to read but less comments and probably more typos

[Gina]

I read this story today. I don't understand George Saunders and I didn't really understand this story. Like Barbara, I've had a prejudice against him, and I still have it. This didn't cure me.