Take
Oh boy, this is really happening. I just clicked the stopwatch and it feels like an exam.
It feels kind of ironic that I’m starting with a George Saunders review, because he is such a meticulous writer, a relentless self-editor who seems to have learned to love the act of killing his darlings. Whereas what I need to do now, as I see the clock striking 2:00, is to learn to embrace the spew.
On that note, time to actually talk about this collection, which I read—listened to—last month as part of my friends' book club I joined last year. The way in which these stories really succeeded for me is in giving voices and realism to the characters. There is a lot of dialogue, inner monologue, and descriptions of thoughts and motivations and internal struggles, all of which flesh everyone out. This reminds me some of Anna Karenina, where Tolstoy would include these deft psychological asides so that you would get this quasi-omniscient perspective on a conversation with layers of knowledge and deception and all that.
In most of these stories, you have these flawed characters struggling with ordinary life decisions and moral dilemmas—there are no monsters or saints, at least not in the one-dimensional, caricature sense. And Saunders is especially adept at giving these characters their own distinctive voices, foibles, and quirks, which enhances their relatability and realness. And by bringing all of these elements to the table, one gets the sense of a looming moral presence, or maybe one is put in the position of that presence, constantly trying to figure our which narratives are self-deception and which are honest reflection, or when a character is acting in good faith or not. The writing really captures the psychological complexity and uncertainty involved in all of the weighty decisions and interactions one engages in in today’s fraught world.
One last point—oh boy—some of the uses of language are quite innovative, funny, and clever, particularly with characters who have been subjected to forms of sci-fi-esque brainwashing and are being reprogrammed to perform certain roles by their handlers.
Afterthoughts
I hadn't planned on including commentary, but man, I feel compelled to, at least this time. Ten minutes is not a long time! Maybe I should be doing this right after I've had my coffee, as opposed to right after dinner.
My main takeaways are: (i) there is a tension between trying to write well and just getting the thoughts out, but it's not so simple, because the thoughts need to be translated into writing—some amount of care is important to ensure I more or less say what I mean; (ii) it's impossible to replicate the loose and free-flowing headspace of a text conversation, especially once you've gotten emotionally into it, in an artificial context like this; and (iii) it's just freaking hard to write anything of substance that's non-cringeworthy in ten minutes.
On that note, it's striking how so much of what I wrote is evocative, to me, of textbook "bad writing." I'm getting kid-pounding-out-college-reaction-paper-at-2am vibes—lazy filler, repetition (though that second "oh boy" was intentional), imprecision, those sorts of things. Maybe bad writing doesn't vary quite as much as do unhappy families.
On the plus, or at least interesting, side, I suspect I will learn a lot about my tendencies as a writer and a thinker, because I've never operated this way before. Even when I did pound out a paper, I always made an outline first—I regarded it as an essential facilitator of the ensuing atrocity. In this case, I merely tried to get a few half-formed concepts in my head, and I had a list of the story titles in front of me (as if there would be time to go through them!), and then it was off to the races.
Anyway, I have managed to get off the first tee, and there are no mulligans. Time to be more Dude-like about this whole brevity thing.
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