Snow, Disappointment, and George Saunders

It is the second or third day of Spring, depending on which person you ask, and a foot of snow is predicted for those of us living in The Republic. I don't know what it is about snow lately—if I've simply become Colorado-ized since my arrival in 1997 and therefore can't stand a moment of daylight without sun (my wife, from Nova Scotia, and I used to rejoice and dance around and other things on days when it rained; one gets tired of endless sun, as one probably does having a dog licking your face, loving you in their way, for your salt, regardless of what you may have done or not done to deserve it) without getting sullen and paralytic, or what—but let's just say it isn't helping. Normally, by now, I would have gone to the garage and grabbed a shovel and starting digging out. It wouldn't have mattered if it was still snowing so long as there was at least six inches of snow and I could say to myself: Better to scoop some now and have less to scoop later on. That is how a person who gets considerable sunlight on his skin almost every day, who has a good outlook here in The Republic, looks at things: do a little now and have less to do later.

But I don't have the energy. I'm not even sure I'll get to it today. I'm not sure I'll leave my study, where the fan is going, drowning out the new noise my one ear is making: not ringing anymore but more like the distant chanting of Zen monks if I was locked in someone's trunk listening to it, way off.

No big deal.

I could be at karate, sparring right now. It would almost certainly be a good thing considering how I feel, which is sort of the way you feel after you've, oh, I don't know, been involved in a situation you're pretty sure is hopelessly fucked up, but you've been involved in it so long that to admit it's as hopelessly fucked up as you have a pretty strong feeling it is is just too fucking depressing to face ...

But then, finally, comes the equivalent of a telegram from God, saying something like: This Situation You've Been Trying To Deal With For Longer Than You Can Bear To Remember Is As You Guessed Hopelessly Fucked Up Stop Worse Still All Your Efforts Haven't Amounted To A Hill Of Beans And Might Have Been Better Spent Shoveling Or Moving Piles Of Rocks From One Senseless Spot To Another Or Practically Anything Else Really Stop Please Gather Your Things And Leave Immediately Before You Go On And Waste Anymore Precious Time On Something Hopeless Stop

OOOHHHMMM OOOHHHHMMMM

At least I've got the good sense to sit down and write, yes? Write your way through it, as countless souls, themselves occasionally beset by the above, have counseled. And if that doesn't work there is always drugs. Or ECT ...

Or ... OR ... one can try George Saunders.

Specifically, his new collection of stories, Tenth of December. One can do this even if he is still working his way through another collection of stories, as well as book four of the entire Thomas Pynchon oeurve. On a day like this one, one can, and should, stop what one is doing and run to Saunders. One never knows, it might only take one story ...

The first story, entitled, "Victory Lap," seemed ironic enough. Just the kind of story, as Thomas Pynchon (who blurbs the collection, which is a bit like Christ appearing out of no where to validate someone's saintliness) remarks, "to get us through these times."

Which is good enough for me.

So I started reading. The story is told from three points of view, from the heads of 1) A pretty young girl "Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday" imagining (concurrent to italicized ballet commands) an assortment of "{special one[s]}" attempting to charm her (think: Simon in "American Idol" crossed with the girl in "The Nutcracker"), 2) Her neighbor, a boy of the same age, whose parents are crazy in the current helicopter-y, high-fuss, micro-manage-y fashion of ambitious, well-heeled, educated parents in our better communities, who has a litany of thoughts going through his mind, things to be done, and avoided, leading to a scrupulously concocted, utterly absurd reward system compliments of Mom and Dad, who love him love him love him, these thoughts punctuated by Tourette's-y blasts of swear word phraseology, one of my favorite being "crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery." To these two POVs is added a third: 3) A guy dressed in the uniform of someone who reads the meter. A guy who looks like, the boy thinks, a "rooskie." A bad person, we get the feeling, with bad designs on the pretty girl, as we don't discover, for sure, until much later ...

And what will the boy who has been given mulitple "directives" by his sublimely, lovingly dictatorial mother and father do, when, after all, he isn't to be outside, on the deck, without shoes on, much less when strangers are in the neighborhood, he is to stay inside until they leave, that is what he is to do, and not mess in business that isn't his, after all, and yet this stranger has this lovely girl, his neighbor, by the wrist, a girl he used to play with when he was younger, who doesn't seem to think much of him now, or so he imagines, and is dragging her to his van, a van the Rooskie borrowed from a guy named Kenneth ...

Are you leaning in yet? I was, in spite of everything. A good story, told well, in not the usual way, whatever we might imagine that might be, can do that.

Get this: instead of saying the boy was too scared to move once the man saw him on the deck and warned that if he so much as moved he, the Rooskie in the meter-reader costume, would stab the girl with the knife he was holding (in this neighborhood where nothing "weird" ever happened), Saunders remarks, "Kyle's mouth was so spitless all he could do was make his mouth do the shape it normally did when saying Yes."

Not dry. Not parched. Spitless. It's not all in the [surprising] diction, but [surprising] diction sure can help. Funny helps, too. And Saunders is very funny. This story, believe it or not, about a girl getting dragged off like one of the girls in "Silence of the Lambs," is very funny, right when you need it to be. Humor at the swerve, when you least expect it. Pretty soon you've forgotten the sun isn't shining, that you have a foot of snow to shovel. You're feeling not all is hopeless.

I won't spoil it. You'll have to read the story to see how it turns out.

Do it if you'd like, if you must.

While I go out and shovel some snow.