Early American literature

Could we just admit that colonial American literature is terrible and stop pretending that it’s worth reading?

If you enjoy Puritan religious screeds about how people are condemned to Hell, regardless of their good works, or if you enjoy political tracts about how an enlightened government should function, then, without question, colonial American literature is for you. For most readers, though, it’s God-awful boring stuff.

The comparable period of English literature (1600-1800), which is the late Renaissance through the early Romantics, has such luminaries as Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Swift, Pope, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, who are certainly worthy of the 1,000 pages they take up in the Norton Anthologies, but the 1,000 pages of the Norton for the same years are devoted to the likes of Mather, Edwards, Jefferson, and Franklin. What’s going on?

Understand that I certainly recognize the genius of these colonial writers, and their works are well worth studying if you’re interested in religion or political thought. My argument is that they aren’t “literature.”

So what is literature?

Literature has an imaginative complexity and ambiguity that forces readers to think deeply about human nature, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. By “imaginative,” I mean the opposite of “functional,” which is prose that has a utilitarian purpose. In other words, narratives (fiction or non-iction), poetry, and drama qualify as “literature.

By my definition, which is admittedly subjective, American literature begins with Washington Irving’s Sketchbook in 1820, but it doesn’t fully blossom for another couple of decades until Hawthorne and Poe began writing their stories. Poetry took another decade or two (believe me, you can skip Longfellow and Whittier!), but by the Civil War, Whitman and Dickinson began writing, and so America truly had some original poetic genius to claim as its own.

Perhaps it simply took a few hundred years for American literature to get grounded, or perhaps it took a traumatic event like the Civil War to kick it into a higher gear, or perhaps simply too many intelligent men and women were too busy establishing a new republic to focus on the production of literature, but maybe it’s time to admit the obvious: American literature really begins ca. 1820. We can skip what came before.

Tenth of December

I first encountered the stories of George Saunders stories when I read “The 400-pound CEO” in Harper’s Magazine in 1993. Saunders soon published other stories, which I read avidly, and then, in 1997, published his first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Not only did I immediately buy the book, I also did something very rare for me: After reading it, I sent him my copy with a fan letter. Saunders returned the book with a nice inscription and added a warm letter of thanks.

I’ve kept up with his career since then, reading his stories (mainly in The New Yorker) and buying his books. His latest is Tenth of December, which is another collection of odd tales of life—either contemporary or in the near future—in suburban America. As usual, Saunders’ eye is keen, whether he is describing the inner fantasies of people who have failed at life or the interactions between people who can barely stand each other’s company. And, also as usual, many of these stories are wickedly funny.

Some of the stories, such as "Puppy," however, are unbelievably sad. Told from two points of view—an upper-class mother who takes her children to look at the puppy offered by sale by a lower-class mother of a mentally handicapped child—this story suggests that any communication between people of different social status isn't possible, which leads to a puppy not being adopted by a family that could have cared properly for it. Instead of the upper-class children having a puppy to make them happy and the lower-class family having $20 to help them eat, no one has anything. I'm not sure if this is pessimism or realism, but it's damn bleak.

Also bleak is "The Semplica Girl Diaries," written in the form of a journal, which tells the story of a father trying to please his teenaged daughter, who has befriended a rich girl, by giving her a birthday party for the ages. Predictably, things go wrong (even after the father miraculously wins $10,000 in the lottery), and daughter and father wind up thoroughly humiliated. Saunders usually understates the tragedy in his stories, and he does in this one, too, as it becomes clear later in the story that something truly horrific, which I won't describe here, has become a new status symbol in suburbia. Suffice to say, once the true horror of the story sets in, you feel a sudden shock of recognition.

A longer story in this collection, "Spiderhead," is familiar ground for fans of Saunders, for it describes the dystopian experiences of an average sort of guy in the not too distant future. In this story, the protagonist, Jeff, is a prisoner who is a guinea pig for experiments in neuroscience that involve flooding his body with artificial stimulants or depressants to gauge how he responds. Can he, for instance, be made to feel deep desire for a woman for whom he finds unattractive? Or, conversely, can he be made to feel emotionally detached as he watches a young woman become so anxious that she kills herself? The point of the experiments, it seems, is to see how commercially viable these new chemical compounds could be. "Spiderhead" is a genuinely scathing indictment, not so much at what American society is now but of what it might become in the next few years.

In some stories, such as "Exhortation," Saunders returns to a theme that he's explored often in his fiction: the miseries of being trapped in a soul-sapping mindless job. In "Exhortation," written in the guise of a cheerful memo, a mid-level manager tries to buck up the spirits of his sales staff, who have been missing their quotas, but his language is really just an implied threat to fire them all if they don't immediately meet their sales. It's reminiscent of the sales competition in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: top salesman gets a Cadillac; second best, a set of steak knives; everyone else, a pink slip. Similarly, in “My Chivalric Fiasco,” a man working at a Renaissance theme park find himself promoted (from the janitorial staff to faux palace guard) in exchange for his silence after he witnesses his supervisor sexually assault a co-worker. Anyone who's ever been stuck in the drudgery of the working life can surely appreciate Saunders' irony as he skewers that dog eat dog world in these two stories.

Critics have rightly hailed Tenth of December as one of the best works of fiction of 2013, so I'm not alone in thinking it's a collection of stories that resonates deeply as you read it. Check it out!

The future of short fiction?

Nicholas Dames, in Public Books, has some very interesting observations about some recent best-selling collections of short stories, including those by George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Karen Russell, and Junot Diaz. After pointing out that short fiction has usually ranked lower than novels on the totem pole of esteem, Dames wonders if American literature is now entering a new phase in which short fiction will gain prominence because of its “elevator-pitch weirdness and intensity.” In other words, he argues that writers are no longer interested in the minimalist short fiction of the past 30 years and, instead, are spinning tales unlike anything readers have encountered before. Particularly new is the emphasis upon a unique narrative voice and tone:

If Gordon Lish’s effect on a generation-plus of writers was to enforce the severities of good technique (correct breathing, no belting), the story now seems to have embraced a pop faith: doesn’t matter how weird the voice, as long as it has style, even a strained, or peculiar, or mimicked style.

Dames further speculates that short fiction might well become the dominant genre in this age of limited attention spans and the small phone screens upon which people read stories. His article is extremely interesting and well worth reading.

PS: Tomorrow I’ll post my review of George Saunders’ Tenth of December.