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Ten stories that find the tenderness inside ordinary American desperation, told in a voice so alive it almost embarrasses you with how much it makes you feel. This is Saunders at the height of his powers, funny and brutal and finally, unexpectedly, full of grace.
The Review
There is a particular kind of writer who can put you inside the skull of a man you'd cross the street to avoid, and have you rooting for him within a paragraph. Saunders is that writer, and this is the collection where his powers feel most fully under control. The people here are clerks and dads and chemically experimented-upon prisoners and teenage girls narrating their own bravery in the third person. They are almost all broke, or scared, or both, and the miracle of these stories is how Saunders refuses to look down on any of them.
The engine of the book is voice. He writes interior monologue the way it actually sounds inside a tired, anxious mind: fragmentary, self-correcting, padded with the little pep talks people give themselves to get through a shift. In "Victory Lap" he braids three of these voices together into something that reads like a held breath. In the title story, an overweight kid and a man who has walked into the woods to die end up saving each other almost by accident, and Saunders earns an ending of real, un-ironic grace, which is a hard thing to do at all and an almost impossible thing to do without sentimentality.
What I love is that the humor and the heartbreak are never separate. "The Semplica Girl Diaries" is the standout for me, a story about middle-class status panic told through a dad's chipper journal entries, and it is very funny right up until the moment it quietly devastates you. Saunders is interested in the small economic humiliations of being alive in modern America, the way wanting to give your kids a nice yard can curdle into something monstrous if you don't look too closely at how it works.
If there's a knock on the collection, it's that a couple of the shorter pieces feel more like exercises than stories, sketches working out a single idea before the longer ones arrive to do the real damage. And the prose tics that make the voices sing can blur together across ten stories read back to back, so I'd recommend spacing them out rather than gulping the book in one sitting. But these are quibbles about a book that pulls off the thing most fiction only promises: it makes you feel, with a clear-eyed and unsentimental compassion, that other people are as real and as frightened and as worthy as you are.
Read a few pages and you'll know whether Saunders is for you. He is sincere in a way that has gone unfashionable, and he risks the kind of open feeling that lesser writers armor themselves against with irony. When it lands, and here it lands again and again, it is as moving as short fiction gets.
Reviewed by Avery
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