The stories collected in Tenth of December by George Saunders have become a textbook demonstration of the fundamental truth in the adage “what a difference a few years make.” The book was published at the beginning of 2013. Over the course of the succeeding next years, the situations and characters and plots of the stories would routinely be described as bizarre or strange or even science fiction. They were the fantastical tales of a seemingly unique imagination describing circumstances of impossibility people by characters lacking any relationship to any but the most distressingly disturbed and deviant of personalities.
Less than a decade later and suddenly there is almost nothing which occurs in these narratives that seems particularly far-fetched. And, yes, that assertion extends even to the most grotesquely unlikely of plots: the human lawn ornaments of "The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Yes, what was clearly intended to be read only as a metaphor of consumer acquisition taking the economic theories of Thorstein Veblen to the maximum limits of possibility seems over the course of a decade of time to transformed into an idea really that not outlandish. One must ask themselves a question: would it really be any more profoundly difficult to buy the plot of that story than to buy the plot of a novel in which anywhere from twenty to sixty million Americans actually believed that a virus killing a thousand people a day was a hoax perpetrated by one political party to wrest control from the other? If a novel featuring that plot had been released on the same day as Tenth of December, it would have been it would have been greeted with the same dismissive attitude toward ever becoming a genuine reality as “The Semplica Girl Diaries” or “Escape from Spiderhead.”
The way that people have come to view the potential darkness lurking in friends and family members that they never even knew existed has opened up brand new potential for accepting the circumstances of stories in this collection that would have seemed genuinely limited to just a fractional percentage of the population. “Escape from Spiderhead” features a terrifying dystopian world of highly controlled drug trials that questions both the basic humanity of health care corporations and the people who work for them and feels like something that might possibly have taken place during Nazi Germany. That is, it felt that way once, but in the harsh light of openly posing the question of “I really don’t care, do you?” toward the image of children of immigrants being ripped from parents and stuck into case, it no longer reads like a story requiring a totalitarian regime to make it feel possible.
Such is the truth of the rest of the stories in this collection of once-fantastically improbably tales. Rare was the review of Tenth of December which used words like “realistic” to describe the stories within. What a difference a few years make.
