NP: Saunders//Lincoln

[Smoke Teff]

Whitehead's review in NYT is good:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/books/review/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders.html?_r=0

GS's accessibility (a lot of this is tonal/emotional accessibility) might
obscure his depth, precision, and genius. He has an astonishing amount of
singular talents: for story construction, for language, for vision--this
latter thing people I think have come to accept on the level of this
country//this moment, but the new book will, I think, expand this to the
scope of the world, history, the spirit.

I think he gets discriminated against in the academy and to a lesser extent
the Serious Fiction Awards scene because he's so human and so pleasurable.
We don't know what to make of him. Our geniuses are supposed to be harder,
less funny, more serious/normal/austere (though he doesn't really waste a
syllable). Another reason: most of his work has come in the form of
short/medium-length stories (future dissertations will be written about his
uniquely minimalist/essentialist approach), when we mostly want novels to
mostly not read.

In terms of ancestry, it's easy to identify some sci-fi and
dystopian/speculative type stuff. But go deeper. Think also/more of some
classic literary patron saints of the oppressed but resilient(ly loving)
spirit, and also (especially?) of the weird mystics. In his DNA I see Gogol
(every three years Saunders teaches a class called "The Russians" that
changes the life of everyone who gets the chance to take it), Babel,
Chekhov, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hemingway, Carver, O'Connor.
Couple others he'll mention a lot that some of you might not have on your
radar: Stuart Dybek (fellow south side of Chicago short story writer; cf.
"Hot Ice"), Barry Hannah.



On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 10:15 AM, Jade Becker <jbecker13 at georgefox.edu>
wrote:

> Thanks for the recommendation--I just picked up *Tenth of December*; I've
> heard a lot of good about Saunders.
>
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:59 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Friends, I write to recommend GS's new (first pub'd) novel, *Lincoln in
>> the Bardo*. I had the privilege of learning from him and getting to know
>> him while he was working on this, so it's been on my horizon for a while,
>> and it was as impactful a read as I expected it to be. I believe it is
>> great. Might not jive with all tastes, or maybe it will. I read it in one
>> sitting and cried a great deal. I don't know how much of the American
>> reading public has or even how many of you have much of a taste for the
>> kind of mysticism or even religious thinking inside Contemporary Literary
>> Fiction you might extract from, say, a Pynchon. I think some people who
>> have been paying casual/medium attention to Saunders will be a little
>> surprised to find it here--which makes me wonder how it'll play with his
>> fans. But if you like his short stuff, and if you like Pynchon, I think
>> you'll find plenty of overlap (some obv. stylistic/thematic reasons to
>> think of *M&D *along the way).
>>
>> Curious to hear what any of you lot think about it.
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Jade Becker
> (530) 518-6859
> George Fox University | Class of 2017
> Writing Consultant, George Fox University Academic Resource Center
> *The Crescent*, Editor-in-Chief
>
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