George Saunders

His old hipster voice repulses me. But I’m also comforted, because while I’m reading George Saunders I’m thinking, I could do this; in a way, I already do this. (How: Embed colloquialisms into strange contexts; transcribe each auditory quirk using punctuation that respects the ear, or logic, but injures the eye.)

No, these days, the stylist I envy is Michael Dummett. His sentences are enormous but never too long: comma after relentless comma gently cushions each from crashing. Read the preface and introduction to Dummett’s opus; download the entire book here (would that be legal? Would it be moral? On Tuesday, at the bus station, I refused a beggar a dollar, on the ground that begging is against the law; when the beggar asked if I always obey the law, I said, Yeah, pretty much. But now I’m encouraging readers to ignore the law). Again: Read Dummett’s preface and introduction; enjoy his ire, in a tome on sense and reference, quantifiers, proper names, etc. (and what a lovely old typeface!).

I’m not sure I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph. It doesn’t quite describe what’s so weird about George Saunders. His interior monologues, for example. The low-prole boy might be chained up in the yard; the low-prole kitchen table might have a tire on it; those details aren’t so weird. What’s weird is the low-prole mother’s private thought-stream: not low-prole dialect but Standard English, no, worse, Hipster English, with silent punctuation (slashes) intruding into her thoughts. 

So what she’d love, for tonight? Was getting the pup sold, putting the kids to bed early, and then, Jimmy seeing her as all organized in terms of the pup, they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.

Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.

Freaking, ending in i-n-g, not in i-n-’. And the ha ha ha echoes the language of the other woman in the story, the foil, the middle-class woman. The low-prole woman uses language above her station. That’s weird. It’s not like the scene in King of the Hill when Boomhauer talks “normal”; no, it’s as if Saunders were saying, I’ll “humanize” you by lending you a voice you’d never have, not even in your imagination, ha ha ha. And so we’re always conscious of the author talking over – drowning out! – the character.