Tenth of December by George Saunders

Published by Random House on January 8, 2013

Sometimes morbid, sometimes zany, often touching, and always original, the stories collected in Tenth of December are written in a light, conversational style -- typically the kind of conversation you'd have with someone who is a little dim -- that conceals their deeper meaning. Many of the characters are like the parents or children you're glad you never had.

My favorite story, "Victory Lap," begins in the mind of Alison, a fifteen-year-old girl whose internal commentary on Eleanor Roosevelt, her ethics teacher's husband's affair, her own ignorance, and the dorkiness of Kyle Boot is, to use Alison's favorite word, awesome. The story then shifts to the scattered mind of Kyle Boot (favorite word: "gar"), whose chance of pleasing his anal-retentive father is nil and whose thoughts are filled with imaginative curses that he would never dare say out loud. When Kyle sees a man trying to kidnap Alison, he must choose between intervening and finishing his chores. The story develops a new layer of oddness when we enter the mind of the kidnapper. The ending is surprisingly sweet as humor and horror give way to karma.

The title story is another standout. Robin is a pale, blubberish boy who invents his own martial arts system (Deadly Forearms) to fight the Nethers. Eber, old and rail-thin, no longer seems real to himself. Both Robin and Eber constantly engage in silent, imagined conversations. When Robin spots Eber (thinking he may be a Nether) walking around a frozen pond, Robin makes it his heroic mission to deliver Eber's coat to him without realizing why Eber left the coat behind. The story is a bittersweet combination of humor and sorrow and inspiration.

In another close contender for my favorite story, Mikey comes "Home" from the war after a court-martial, just in time to watch his mother and her new boyfriend being evicted. The mother of his kids has taken up with a new boyfriend in his absence. His barely contained rage results in low-level violence, but his actions are inevitably greeted with the ubiquitous (and thus meaningless) phrase "Thank you for your service." None of that sounds amusing, but this serious story provokes unexpected laughter. It's better, I guess, to laugh than to cry.

I first read "Escape from Spiderhead" in The Best American Short Stories 2011. Saunders' futuristic take on chemically enhanced language and love was one of my favorite stories in that volume.

The remaining stories are all worth reading. More a vignette than a story, "Sticks" describes the way the narrator's father decorates a pole to commemorate Christmas, the Fourth of July, Veteran's Day, the Superbowl, Groundhog Day, an Earthquake in Chile, his wife's death, and, ultimately, his life. "Al Roosten" worries that noboby will bid on him at the anti-drug celebrity auction -- in fact, he worries about all sorts of things when his mind isn't buzzing with nonstop grandiose fantasies. A janitor in a medieval village is promoted to Pacing Guard after he witnesses his boss engaging in a sexual dalliance with another employee, a happy event that leads to "My Chivalric Fiasco" when he gets carried away with the role. The lives of two moms who are each doing their best, albeit in very different ways, intersect in "Puppy." Saunders takes a comical look at the power of positive thinking, in form of a memo from the boss, in "Exhortation."

Every story in Tenth of December is the product of a delightfully strange imagination, the work of an accomplished writer with a distinctive style. This is a collection of small gems that perfectly balance plot and character development. There isn't a dud in the bunch.

RECOMMENDED

The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on January 8, 2013 

If you've read Jim Harrison you know what to expect (gentle humor poking fun at the hapless male) and what not to expect (commas) from his writing. The River Swimmer is a short volume consisting of two novellas. The first addresses the familiar theme of Harrison's recent work: the aging man's need to renew his life, his eternal struggle to understand women, and his slightly ridiculous response to sexual desire. The second concerns a young man who endeavors to swim through the bewildering array of obstacles and opportunities that life presents.

In "The Land of Unlikeness," a man must choose between "the world's idea of success" and his love of creating art. Twenty years divorced and three years estranged from his daughter, Clive still hasn't gotten his life together. A former artist who abandoned painting for the financial security of academia, Clive is taking an involuntary leave of absence following an unfortunate encounter with an Art Tart. At his sister's insistence, he is using the time to visit his elderly bird-watching mother at his childhood home in Michigan. Since this is the mother who, years earlier, made a speech at dinner that ended with "You failed us, son," it's easy to understand why Clive doesn't want to go home again. Clive's thoughts are occupied by missed opportunities and mild regrets, some of which pertain to a childhood flame who still lives in town. Still, in his less sullen moments, Clive displays the guarded optimism that is common in Harrison's characters: "He had the happy thought that he had zero percent financing on the rest of his life because no one more than nominally cared except himself. He might be going mad as a hatter but it hadn't been that bad so far." At the age of sixty, well into life's third act, can Clive stop "toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies" and find a way to allow "a little light ... to peek into his beleaguered soul"?

"The River Swimmer" tells an offbeat story. Thad grew up on an island in the middle of a river. When he wasn't working on the family farm, he was swimming. "If there were indeed water spirits they had a firm hold on him like love eventually does on young men, an obsessional disease of sorts." After brawling with Friendly Frank, his girlfriend's father, Thad swims the hundred miles from Muskegon to Chicago. He hooks up with a girl he meets along the way. To Thad's embarrassment, the girl and her wealthy father become involved in his family drama when Friendly Frank's employees put Thad's father in the hospital, an outgrowth of the confrontation between Thad and Frank. Thad doesn't want to hate Friendly Frank, but "surely part of the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them." Soon he finds himself back on the farm, in the company of Frank's daughter, the wealthy man's daughter, and another girl he's bedded. Women and employers and swimming coaches have plans for Thad. With his whole life ahead of him, Thad doesn't want to be pinned down like a butterfly in a collection. As Thad transitions to adulthood, he is desperate to retain his freedom, his sense of adventure, his profound link to water. Yet in the end, he learns that life can't be planned.

Both stories are populated with quirky characters. The earthy characters in "The River Swimmer" are particularly engaging. As always, Harrison's writing is filled with sharp insight as he gently dissects his characters, exposing faults and revealing quintessential goodness. It would be difficult to read these stories without a smile, although "The River Swimmer" turns out to be the more serious of the two.

RECOMMENDED

The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

First published in the UK in 2012; published by Bloomsbury USA on January 8, 2013 

Around the world, reports are surfacing of children killing their relatives for no apparent reason.  When a seven-year-old girl makes the news by shooting family members with a nail gun, Hesketh Lock views the story through the lens of an anthropologist, as “a parable of dysfunctional times.”  Perhaps that is the best way to read The Uninvited.

Many dystopian novels begin with the world in a dystopian state.  They may or may not explain how the world’s condition came about, but when they do, the explanation tends to be cursory.  The Uninvited takes a different approach.  The story begins in a normal world.  The reader watches as that world collapses.  The cause of the crisis, when it is finally revealed, is more imaginative than the zombie plague that has become the hallmark of apocalyptic fiction.

Hesketh is an isolated man, a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome.  He is a compulsively honest, concrete thinker who lacks people skills.  He managed to live with a woman for awhile but Kaitlin had an affair so his isolation is again complete, despite his desire to maintain a relationship with Freddy, Kaitlin’s seven-year-old son.  Hesketh works as a corporate troubleshooter, targeting anomalies in behavioral patterns in the workplace.  He undertakes a series of assignments involving corporate saboteurs in Taiwan, Sweden, and Dubai who, after contending that they were controlled by spirits or trolls or djinns, kill themselves.  Hesketh believes there has been a global outbreak of hysteria fed by indigenous superstitions, although he has trouble explaining why all the dead guys had developed cravings for salt.  Nor can he explain why, just before he watched a man plummet from the top of a building, he saw a little girl urging the man to jump.

I expected The Uninvited to be a conventional horror story.  It isn’t.  The Uninvited is a hybrid of the science fiction, horror, and mystery genres, but it is also a commentary on how society addresses disaffected children.  What is the real horror:  kids who kill or the tendency to forget that they are kids, to treat them as inhuman creatures?  Particularly unsettling, because it’s so close to reality, is the public’s willingness (as the crisis intensifies) to label children as terrorists, to concentrate them in camps and drug them, because a desire for safety trumps compassion and understanding.  The public will always prefer to act in ignorance rather than wait for knowledge if action instills an artificial sense of security.

Still, it isn’t necessary to read The Uninvited as a parable.  Taken at face value, it is an absorbing, nightmarish story.  I was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of Liz Jensen’s prose and by the depth of her characters.  Jensen exercises admirable restraint in her depiction of Hesketh.  Some writers would exaggerate his mental disorder to manufacture sympathy for the character.  Jensen is more subtle.  Hesketh is functional but a little off.  He’s keenly aware of numbers and time and colors and patterns.  He mentally constructs origami when he’s stressed.  Sometimes he rocks back and forth.  Jensen makes it clear that Hesketh is wired in an unusual way, but Hesketh likes the way he’s wired, enjoys the advantages that derive from his disorder (particularly his skill at pattern recognition), and scoffs when others pity him or assume he wants to be as “normal” as they are.  That’s an unusually insightful characterization of someone who would widely be pitied for his mental illness.

The Uninvited delivers a thought-provoking message but the message never overshadows the storytelling.  This is the way to write dystopian horror (and without a single vampire or zombie!). 

RECOMMENDED

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

First published in 1958

Set in 2049, A Case of Conscience begins with four humans on the planet Lithia. Ruiz-Sanchez is a biologist and a Jesuit priest. Cleaver is a physicist. Agronski is a geologist and Michelis is chemist. They are members of the Lithian Review Commission, tasked with deciding whether Lithia would be a suitable port of call for Earth. Each commission member arrives at a conclusion by a different process of reasoning, although the "reasoning" employed by Cleaver, and particularly by Ruiz-Sanchez, is shaky. Cleaver believes Lithia would be ideal for the development of weapons while Ruiz-Sanchez thinks the planet is literally a satanic creation. Since Ruiz-Sanchez has arrived at a conclusion that is consistent with Manichaeaism, a religious philosophy discredited by his church, Ruiz-Sanchez expects to be excommunicated. He nonetheless casts his vote on that basis and the Commission returns home. The humans take with them a gift from the Lithians -- an egg that will hatch in flight, giving birth to Egtverchi.

The second half of the novel takes place on Earth, where Egtverchi proves adept at exposing human hypocrisy and, in his words, "breeding dissension." Given his own television show, he urges viewers to be mad as hell and not take it anymore, a message that suits his "audience of borderline madmen," as one person characterizes it, or in Ruiz-Sanchez' view, "those who feel cut off, emotionally and intellectually, from our society and its dominant cultural traditions." In other words, they feel alienated, and they identify with the alien who goads them. Egtverchi wants his followers to become wrenches in the cogs, to tear up their identity cards and abandon the cities.

Long before "worldbuilding" became a science fiction buzzword, James Blish carefully created a truly alien world (described in scientific detail in an appendix). Houses are made of ceramic pottery, each one unique. A tree that emits radio waves is the basis for long distance communications. Lithians have no politics, no nations, no media, no celebrations, no religion. The Lithians' science departs credibly from Earth's, in part because it is based on the unique characteristics of the planet Lithia. Blish managed to give the aliens (who resemble tall reptilian kangaroos) a genuinely alien culture as well as a unique means of reproduction and (for lack of a better term) childhood development. It is, in fact, the gestation process, and its apparent confirmation that intelligent creatures are the result of evolution, that convinces Ruiz-Sanchez of Lithia's satanic nature.

The future Earth that Blish imagined is a product of his time. Most people live underground, in bomb shelters the size of cities. The "Shelter economy" that developed eventually produced widespread rioting, which prompted the United Nations to create a true world government. That should have ended the threat of nuclear war and obviated the need for a Shelter economy, but the Shelter economy still prevails, although members of the ruling class live comfortable, decadent lives. Egtverchi is seen as a threat to the continued existence of the class division that serves the leaders so well.

Egtverchi's televised call for civil unrest seems like small potatoes in the day of 24-hour cable pundits, the wackiest of whom urge their wacky followers to do all sorts of wacky things. Yet Egtverchi's message resonates with those whose lives are spent in service of the Shelter economy, meeting labor quotas, never leaving their underground bunkers. To the extent that the Shelter economy is seen as quasi-communism (a frequent theme of 1950s science fiction), Egtverchi points the way to individualism.

A Case of Conscience is notable as one of the first science fiction novels to consider the core beliefs of Christianity in a universe where humans are not the only sentient species. It raises theological questions that are echoed in The Sparrow and some of Philip K. Dick's novels. A Case of Conscience relies heavily on Catholic dogma, and much of that dogma feels dated -- not that the religion has changed, but the world has. Ruiz-Sanchez' belief that if God did not create the Lithians, Satan must have done so (because only Satan would replace divine creation with evolution) seems a little silly (and the silliness of dogma may have been Blish's point), but Ruiz-Sanchez' sincere spiritual debate, the angst he feels while wrestling with spiritual issues, makes him a sympathetic character.

Several other issues of conscience are at play in the novel that make it worth a reader's time. One faction on Earth wants to develop Lithia for the dubious benefit of Earth in a way that will surely harm the Lithians. What, if anything, to do about Egtverchi's rabble rousing poses another dilemma. As a priest, Ruiz-Sanchez must decide whether to carry out the Pope's wishes despite his fear that the Pope's reasoning is flawed, a fear that forces him to confront the heresy that the doctrine of papal infallibility might itself be flawed. All of these issues are interesting, as is the world that Blish creates. If for no other reason, A Case of Conscience deserves to be read by a modern audience for Blish's lush prose.

RECOMMENDED

Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by Mysterious Press on January 8, 2013 

Joyce Carol Oates writes about horrors that none of us want to imagine, and does it with such seductive prose we can't stop reading. Yet Oates' great talent is to find the horrific in both the commonplace and in the unthinkable. Daddy Love begins with a momentarily misplaced car that leads to a child's barely contained panic and a mother's sense of failure, a small horror that evolves into the larger horror of child abduction.

Part one takes place in 2007. Dinah Whitcomb has invested "all of her volcanic Mommy love" in her only child, Robbie. She strives to make every moment a learning experience for her five-year-old son. She faults herself when she feels tired, because a happy mother should always feel strong. Later she will blame herself for letting go of Robbie's hand when Robbie is snatched from her. Although she is faultless -- the abductor strikes her, first with a fist and then, when she runs after him, with a van -- Dinah feels "the defeat of her life as a mother."

The first four chapters tell the same brief story, each from a slightly different perspective, adding or subtracting facts, revealing more of Dinah's life, her sense of connection with her husband and son. In chapter five, time again begins to move forward. But can life really move forward for someone who has been as badly damaged, both physically and emotionally, as Dinah?

In the chapters that follow, Oates changes the perspective, allowing the reader to follow Robbie and his kidnapper. Oates reveals the demented mind of Daddy Love with the same skill that makes her portrayal of Dinah's tormented mind so convincing. It is nonetheless disappointing that Oates chose to make the character so purely evil, when a more nuanced approach -- a sex offender who struggles against urges he can't control, as is usually the case -- would have been less obvious.

Part two takes the reader to 2013. Robbie, now known as Gideon Cash, is in sixth grade. His true history, unknown to the teachers who believe he is Daddy Love's autistic son, is reflected only in his macabre drawings. Perspective changes again as the reader sees the world through Robbie's eyes. And as she does with Dinah, Oates enters Robbie's mind with uncommon insight. She presents a more subtle view of Robbie than is typical in fictional portrayals of abuse victims. Robbie's personality and behavior provide some of the novel's most thought-provoking moments.

Although Oates' prose is always first-rate, it doesn't soar to the same height in Daddy Love as it does in her best work. The story isn't particularly innovative. It is, in fact, too predictable to have the impact Oates probably intended. After the strong opening chapters, I felt let down by the pedestrian path that the plot follows.

The characters, as a reader expects from Oates, are fully developed and completely convincing. On the other hand, while Oates often paints portraits of victims, the characters in Daddy Love are not as memorable as those some of her other fiction: they evoke sympathy in ways that are just too easy, too predictable. To her credit, however, Oates avoids coating her characters in sugar. She understands that people rarely respond to tragedy in ways that make them noble and likable, as so many writers would have us believe. Dinah wouldn't be the ideal spokeswoman for mothers of abducted children; her connection with reality is tenuous, her fragility is unnerving. Dinah's husband realizes that he's lost perspective, that he's defined his entire life by a single catastrophic event, but he's powerless to change. Although these aren't Oates' best creations, it is for the characters rather than the plot that I recommend Daddy Love.

Be warned: Some scenes involving Daddy Love and Robbie are disturbing, and while none of them are described in graphic detail, sensitive readers should be cautioned that child abuse is very much a part of the book's content. There are also a couple of chapters that will make dog lovers cringe. Oates has never been a writer who shelters her readers from the darkest realities of life.  She does not do so here.

RECOMMENDED