![]() That’s classic Saunders, with its use of the vernacular, the specific language of a character, to get at material that is both elusive and profound. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.” You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. Something/someone bigger than him kept refusing. He’d kept waiting for some special dispensation. “It happened to everyone supposedly, but now it was happening specifically to him. “It wasn’t fair,” reflects one of the protagonists of the title story, a 52-year-old man dying of cancer. Certainly, that’s the operative sensibility of his new book of short fiction, “Tenth of December.” The book has a sneaky coherence, as if it were less a group of isolated pieces than an investigation into what happens when we are brought up short by life. That’s not inaccurate: How else do we account for, say, the title effort of his first collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” with its bleakly absurd portrait of a Civil War theme park? And yet to read him exclusively on such terms is to miss the point. George Saunders is often described as a satirist. ![]()
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