The title story of that book introduced a narrative trope that by now has become a signature Saunders device, a trope encompassing both plot and setting through which the story’s protagonist, also the narrator, relates his experiences as an employee of an outlandish theme park in which American life and history have been reduced in scale and repackaged as entertainment - although there’s never much indication that anyone is actually entertained by it (certainly not the employees). It may be, in fact, his most consistently engaging book since his first, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996). Saunders’s new collection of short fiction, Tenth of December, manifests all of these appealing qualities. Reinforced by Saunders’s ability to mimic the inanities of American speech in dialogue, this adept orchestration of voices and language practices is frequently a source of pleasure in itself. Above all, the stories are often very funny, so that even if we remain uncertain how to interpret the narratives’ mutated reality, we can still enjoy their oddities, especially as conveyed through Saunders’s deadpan, understated style, which can assimilate the most stilted, bureaucratic jargon with the most colloquial, slang-ridden expressions, often in the same paragraph or even the same sentence. Although his stories are to first-time readers no doubt a little puzzling, requiring that we accommodate ourselves to their surrealistic settings and premises, ultimately they are puzzling in an entertaining way, the settings and events just off-kilter enough to provoke the reader’s curiosity, the premises and actions just outrageous enough that we find their departures from established reality both disconcerting and surprisingly tangent to existing conditions of that reality.

It is not so hard to understand why readers and reviewers would find the fiction of George Saunders appealing.

The tenth of december short story