Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. There was a certain critical period. Powerful story to me. Award-winning author and professor of English George Saunders’ short story “Love Letter” is featured in the April 6, 2020, edition of The New Yorker. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. If you buy something through our links, birthday, that bronze Lincoln bank? Yeah, his imitators have mucked it up a bit and his sycophants have made him less than likable (the overpraised “nice guy”, I can see where you’re coming from a bit) but he’s still an instantiator of a genre. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. State facility or fed? In 2004 George Saunders wrote a short story called “The Bohemians” which appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Both “Elliott Spencer,” with its rhetorical innovations, and “Love Letter” serve as noticeable improvements on “Little St. Don” (if not correctives). Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot,” for example, recounts the life of its hardworking title character, who cheerfully and tirelessly serves in various menial jobs for people, including his own family, who take him for granted and refuse to let him marry the woman he loves. ), In “The Darling,” another Chekhov story included in this book, a woman has a series of relationships in which she repeatedly adopts every belief and concern of her current partner. I wonder if he chose these stories, in part, because their ambiguity militates against this tendency toward preachiness. George Saunders has been teaching short story writing at Syracuse University for 24 years, and his new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a distillation of what he tries to impart to his students. It’s that “wry, satirical smugness” that stuck out to me, a smugness that’s part and parcel of the sense that “some adult or adults would arrive…to set things right.” Saunders is not only describing an attitude shared by millions of Americans, but also describing the implicit tone of his story “Little St. Don.”. All this, I must confess, is a lot more interesting to me than “Alyosha the Pot” itself. And yeah, reading narr and Saunders is not good, I agree, but as yr comment states, a lot of blind eye in that POV, narrative or possibly-also-authorial. If I squint at these Russian stories sideways and in exactly the right light, I can see that their characters, like Saunders’, tend to be crushed by forces they can barely understand, let alone defy. The story is told by a young boy who lives in a neighborhood in the past. Chrostowska’s collection A Cage for Every Child (Book acquired, some time early last week). Please try again. As I noted above, the impetus for the grandfather’s reply is his grandson’s request for help for J. What looks scary/unpleasant to us may not be so scary/unpleasant to them, i.e., they have seen worse.” A short story by George Saunders. I tried to avoid reading/critiquing the narrator as Saunders himself (generally a bad critical technique), but I suspect that the narrator’s views are Saunders’ views. The minor functionary to whom the nose belongs ends up chasing the organ all over St. Petersburg after it somehow gets itself appointed to the superior rank of state councilor and travels by carriage wearing a “gold-embroidered uniform.” The functionary’s inability to find redress for this outrage fuels the story’s humor, as do the blasé responses of officials when he seeks their help. It’s easy to imagine that Sanders, in his early 60s, is surrounded by young writers prone to moral absolutes, as young people often are. Superlatives. G eorge Saunders was born in Texas in 1958 and raised in Illinois. I claimed in my essay on “Little St. Don” that the story’s biggest failure was that. but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. Sia Asked Critics to Watch Her Controversial New Movie Before Judging It, so I Did. was “Elliott Spencer,” a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters. You can cancel anytime. After an accident, he contemplates his impending death without much distress, but at the moment before he dies, in the story’s final sentence, “something seemed to startle him.” Saunders, a champion of all underdogs who wishes Alyosha had stood up for himself more, wants to think that the character repudiates his passivity in his last moment. Trump’s rhetoric purposefully surpasses absurdity; indeed, Trump’s rhetoric is nihilistically absurd, the ur-huckster’s argot that distills over two centuries of American con-artist culture for a 21st-century mass media environment. Yet it’s hard to see how the voice that Saunders became famous for might have been inspired by any of the stories he extols in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, except for “The Nose,” the story he does the weakest job of explicating. I read it as “I’m lame, but comfortable in my lameness, and I don’t like to think of you uncomfortable, so take it from me, avuncular etc., and choose comfort.” Either that or that typical almost-passive-agressive-white-buddhist-baby-boomer-in-academia’s “it is what it is so why attach to anything strong-feelling-ed about it?” We’re just supposed to marvel at the un-ness of it, I guess, like, wow, he can really hang in there with the no answer, the no conclusion; how awake he is! Much of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain addresses how to write, but for someone like myself, a person with no plans to produce a short story, it better serves as a course in how to read short stories—perhaps even how to reconcile herself to stories in which not a lot happens. Indeed, it seems that connecting with an audience is Saunders’ main concern. Instead, “Love Letter” reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. And you'll never see this message again. “SGs have lived very different lives from us. I agree that this one’s a dud, Michele, but I don’t think Saunders is a lazy old eminence now. And as I write this, I realize it’s because the dystopia “Love Letter” evokes seems far too close to our own reality. Saunders kind of lost me with his avuncular-baby-boomer-elder-statesman of edgyish-yet-publishable-in-The-New-Yorker-lit thing. But is that enough? He’s also still challenging himself and not resting on his laurels. But searching so hard for congruences between these old-fashioned stories and George Saunders’ jaunts through the grotesque simulacra of late capitalism makes me feel a bit like Saunders convincing himself that Tolstoy’s Alyosha renounces obedience in his final moment. He also insists that Robbie destroy the letter after reading it. Blargh. Chekhov is the originator and the master of the quiet story in which not much changes in a character’s circumstances or outlook, except perhaps for the bolt of enlightenment, sometimes labeled an “epiphany,” that strikes the character (or perhaps only the reader) toward the end. I hate to damn a story for what it *doesn’t* do, but the narrator is so uncritical of the end of the twentieth century—there’s no admission that his generation was complicit in dismantling the public commons, stripping every postwar social program for parts, a process that engendered the rise of scammers, grifters, and conmen to the political leadership of this country. ( Log Out /  As a result, the argument goes, the “literary” short story has become a rarefied form, overpolished and predictable, the cookie-cutter product of an enervating system.
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