Tenth of December

Tenth of December Review

The title story of Tenth of December follows two characters across a single winter afternoon: Robin, an imaginative and bullied thirteen-year-old who fantasises about rescuing a girl from school from various imagined perils, and Don Eber, a middle-aged man with a terminal illness who has walked into the woods to die on his own terms, having left his coat behind so the cold will finish the job efficiently. Their paths converge at an icy pond. What happens is unexpected, generous, and heartbreaking in ways that accumulate slowly as the story proceeds and then arrive all at once. It may be the finest short story published in American fiction in the twenty-first century.

Tenth of December, which won the Story Prize and was called “the best book you’ll read this year” by the New York Times, is the collection that brought George Saunders to the widest readership. The ten stories here represent the full range of his methods: “Escape from Spiderhead,” set in a pharmaceutical testing facility where prisoners are dosed with experimental emotion-enhancing drugs, uses science fiction premises to ask questions about consent and responsibility that feel entirely contemporary. “Exhortation” is a memo from a middle manager to his staff at a facility whose purpose is never specified but whose effect is the slow destruction of everyone inside it. “Home” follows a recently returned soldier, damaged and displaced, navigating a domestic landscape that no longer quite fits the person he has become.

What unifies these formally diverse pieces is what has always unified Saunders’s work: the conviction that ordinary human beings contain more moral seriousness, more capacity for love and sacrifice, than the systems they inhabit are designed to recognise. His characters are not heroes — they are people who have been shaped by economic pressure, institutional language, and the specific psychological distortions that come from trying to survive inside organisations that do not see them as fully human. The formal innovation in each story is in the service of this conviction: if you want to show what corporate language does to a person, you have to write in corporate language, and then find a way to let the person’s humanity survive inside it.

The collection also contains “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” which follows a father’s attempt to give his daughter a birthday party she will remember, and whose central horror — revealed incrementally, with Saunders’s characteristic patience — is one of the most disturbing images in recent American fiction. It is characteristic of Tenth of December that this horror is handled entirely through the domestic and the ordinary, that the father is sympathetic throughout, and that the moral catastrophe of the story arrives as a form of recognition rather than condemnation. Saunders does not judge his characters. He simply, very carefully, shows us what they are doing.

”The Semplica Girl Diaries”

The collection’s most quietly devastating story follows a father trying to give his daughter a birthday party that meets her expectations. Told through diary entries, the story builds the father’s sympathetic, self-deprecating voice — his love for his children, his anxiety about money, his desire to be a better provider than he is — over its length before revealing the nature of the decorative centerpiece he has purchased for the party: a display of young women from developing countries who have agreed, for financial reasons, to be threaded through the scalp and displayed in the garden as living ornaments.

The horror arrives incrementally. The diary voice processes the decorations as normal — as the kind of status symbol that the father’s wealthier neighbors have, as a thing his daughter will be proud of — and the normalization is the point. The story depicts not a monster but a man in the process of learning to accept something monstrous because the social pressure to accept it is stronger than the moral intuition that resists it. By the time the story’s central event — the daughter’s action in response to what she has been given — arrives, the reader has been positioned inside the father’s consciousness in a way that makes moral judgment impossible and moral recognition unavoidable.

”Escape from Spiderhead”

The pharmaceutical testing premise of “Escape from Spiderhead” — prisoners dosed with experimental emotion-enhancing drugs in a facility that is horrifying and professionally casual in equal measure — is one of the collection’s most direct science fiction pieces, and it demonstrates that the satirical-dystopian mode can generate genuine thriller mechanics. The story’s narrator is a prisoner who retains moral feeling even within the facility’s deforming conditions, and the decision he makes in the story’s final pages is the clearest expression in Tenth of December of Saunders’s central moral conviction: that kindness is available to people even in systems designed to prevent it, and that the choice to enact it has meaning even when everything around it says it doesn’t.

The Range of the Collection

Part of what the Story Prize citation recognized in Tenth of December was the formal range of the collection: no two stories use the same strategy. “Exhortation” is a memo. “Home” is a third-person realist narrative. “Escape from Spiderhead” is science fiction. “The Semplica Girl Diaries” is a journal. “Tenth of December” itself moves between two free indirect voices. The variety is not restlessness but evidence of a writer who has fully internalized the principle that form and content are inseparable — each story requires the form that fits its particular emotional and moral work.

Saunders’s Moral Vision

The collection confirms what Saunders’s earlier work had established: his is an essentially moral imagination, one that begins from the premise that ordinary people contain more decency than the systems they inhabit are designed to accommodate, and that the gap between what people could be and what their circumstances permit them to be is the space where meaningful fiction lives. This is not sentimentality — Saunders does not protect his characters from their circumstances, does not provide easy exits, does not suggest that goodwill is sufficient. It is moral seriousness: the insistence that what people choose to do under pressure matters, even when nothing in the structure around them suggests that it does.

Tenth of December is the fullest expression of this vision in the short story form, and it confirms Saunders as one of the essential American fiction writers of his generation.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — The most fully realised expression of what George Saunders can do, confirming him as one of the most important American fiction writers of his generation.