By Meg Mason
Novelists George Saunders and Meg Mason. Credit:Janie Barrett/James Alcock
Here is a short list of things a journalist does not expect an author, of some fame, to say at the beginning of a phone interview:
I’m so glad you called.
I have been looking forward to this all day.
Or, at any point during that interview, if the author is Booker Prize-level famous:
You know, I’m so nervous about the next book.
I’m just kind of a bumbler. I never really have been able to figure out the right path.
I’m sorry I’m talking so much, but one more thing…
Or, ever, if you are a journalist who is also a novelist, and has an absolute intention not to raise that fact with a literary voice of a generation, even if they have been some source of inspiration:
Let me tell you something.
I read your book.
Here is what will happen if George Saunders does say that, and he was actually all of your inspiration. If, in fact, George Saunders is the only reason your last novel exists and that you’re still a writer. You will say oh, but listening back later, you will hear how the word came out as a strangulated little yelp as though you had just slammed your finger in a drawer and were trying to pretend to a witness that the pain was not shocking.
Should he add, and I thought it was [here he gives you the greatest compliment of your life, which can never be repeated, by you, to anyone, for how sickly self-aggrandising that would be, also you will sound like a fantasist], well then, after the briefest pause, just long enough to remember and dismiss your beforehand commitment not to say anything, out of you will pour a torrent of words.
Author George Saunders won the Booker in 2017 for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.Credit:AP
Maybe not the whole story, of how you wrote a manuscript, it took a year, it was terrible, you deleted it, you were devastated, you quit fiction forever, even though fiction had been your singular, lifelong ambition but then, one day, you read a thing George Saunders said about writing, you went looking for more such things and copied them out, and when you dragged your miserable carcass back to your tiny backyard writing shed to try again, you started sticking them up where you could see them until the walls were eventually shingled with scraps of paper, advice that might not make sense to a less-desperate person – “Let’s continue”, “What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e. using our personalities as a way of coping with life”, “Bob is an asshole,” – but if ink faded every time it was read, it would have disappeared by the end of that year, when you finished your book. Whether it is anything close to [the thing he said], it saved you as a writer. So, definitely, you will tell George Saunders some of that.
And goodness, he will be kind about it.
He was so kind about it, my breathless monologue, even though he was in the middle of packing the house in upstate New York that he and his wife, writer Paula Saunders, have lived in for 15 years, with the shed in which he has always written.
“And I thought, I can do it by myself, but it’s just unbelievable, the most epic thing I’ve ever attempted. It’s like you’re walking into a snow globe of all the selves you ever were. I’ll find some old letters and suddenly, there’s one from 1978 and one from 2015, and there are pictures, and it’s really… it’s pretty moving and a little exhausting.” And he has two weeks to finish. But separately, he’s in no rush to get back to it.
I know I should not have been surprised, I was just too paralysed by surprise to remember that besides his literary reputation – greatest prose stylist of our time, modern master of the short story, et cetera – Saunders has a reputation for kindness, eliciting a kind of personal affection from readers, and writers-about-him, that authors of equal eminence, his fellow Booker winners, do not.
George Saunders: “My understanding of Buddhism is that you should just shut up about it.”Credit:Damon Winter/Redux/Headpress
That is, I’m not sure Ian McEwan has ever been described as “everyone’s favourite literary uncle” in a profile for the prestigious Lit Hub. Perhaps Julian Barnes is also a hugger, but no journalist has led with that fact in a major Times interview – a hugger who arrives early and makes you feel as if he is “in some deep and inviolable way, yours.” In another few paragraphs, the journalist is crying, over a line of Saunders’ prose. Probably because, as a critic elsewhere noted of Saunders, and might not of Jonathan Franzen, “part of his greatness is that reading him feels very much like being spoken to kindly.”
In real life, Saunders, who is 63, the father of two adult daughters, both writers, speaks like a dad. But also, charmingly, like a teenage girl, conveying whole worlds of empathy and thoughtfulness and uncertainty, likes and you knows. To the question, has he noticed and wondered about the affection thing?
“Oh yeah, I mean, I love that and I don’t really quite understand it. The only thing is, I’m thinking it has to do with… well, ok, so, I was going to say good manners? What I mean is, if somebody writes me an email, I’m going to write them back.”
What he doesn’t mean is that the readers’ perception is entirely correct. It’s just that if the perception already exists, you can’t go around not writing back to people. You have to, he says, “try and live up to that guy.”
“I can be pretty grumpy, I’m just normal. But, I think ok, I have an effect on people who know a certain rarefaction of the person that comes through writing? And you could say, ‘Oh it’s false’, or you could say, ‘Well, it’s partly true and let me do the best I can with that.’ If somebody can find you lovely, then that gives you something to shoot for, for sure.”
Meg Mason attends the 2022 Women’s Prize For Fiction ceremony in London.Credit:AP
Saunders’ oeuvre includes five short story collections, the Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the exquisite novella Fox8; endless award-winning journalism; and the recent non-fiction collection A Swim in the Pond with Rain, based on his two decades teaching creative writing at Syracuse University in New York State.
Yet, still, as an author? He thinks, “You’re also there to be on the same level as somebody. You know, like somebody comes up to me…” And let’s imagine they do, very often, for advice – because as well as being a vastly technical study of Russian short stories, A Swim in the Pond is an incredibly encouraging guide to writing that sold like the clappers – and it could be draining, another writer as successful might decline to engage with the unpublished but, to Saunders, “…it’s like, that thing they used to say in Catholic school, if Jesus appeared to you in the form of an old man, would you be happy with the way you behaved? I think that’s something I really believe. I don’t know. The only thing I can say is I’m always worried about letting people down.”
Raised Catholic, Saunders became a Buddhist in his 30s and maybe some of his intent to be present, to notice and be generous, comes from that practise. But since he once said, “my understanding of Buddhism is that you should just shut up about it,” it’s hard to conclude.
Either way, those qualities are evident in the portrayal of his own characters. The men and women who populate his stories are not, generally speaking, life’s winners. They are ordinary, exhausted, not-very-good parents with sad cars and big, unmet dreams. You wonder if they are some of the people that Saunders, who grew up in working-class Chicago, met before he became a writer – late, unpublished until he was 38 – when he was a roofer, convenience store worker, a “knuckle-puller” at an abattoir, eventually a tech writer for an engineering company, where he started experimenting with fiction on company time.
They are definitely Brenda, a low-level office worker with a debt problem, two deadbeat adult children, and a situation with her manager, in A Thing at Work, from his new story collection Liberation Day. As often, the story is told in and out of a character’s voice, which per his gift, Saunders captures precisely, but does not unkindly imitate. Brenda thinking, “Probably shouldn’t have said that thing about stealing coffee. Because now Gen might think I actually have done that. Which, in fact, she had been doing that…” If the story is funny – it is, they all are – Saunders doesn’t make a joke of Brenda of the bouncing cheques, either. Even in telling you, others do: “Like when Greggie, her son, called her stubby little arms her ‘T.rex arms.’ He didn’t mean it. It was his way of saying he loved her.”
George Saunders’ latest collection, Liberation Day, is published on October 19.Credit:Nine
In all this, I would hate to give you the impression that I understand short stories and how they operate, that I absolutely get how someone could be fanatical about Tolstoy, the way Saunders is, and that nothing brings me more personal joy than a bit of Gogol. Russian short stories are too hard for me. So are non-Russian ones. It’s like, I don’t even understand the goal of short stories generally – I tell the modern master of them. Who says, “Well. One is to break your heart. One is to convey the essence of life. Also, to be a really efficient little machine. But, it’s a difficult form. I don’t think anyone should feel bad, you know. If you can’t read a Russian short story, then they’re just not for you. No problem. It might just be a place where my neuroses has found a perfect home, in artistic form. Like, make it efficient motherf—!”
Whether I will ever get there, I believe Saunders’ explanation of why so many people, so many more people you could say based on the unexpected frenzy of paid subscribers to Saunders new Substack, Story Club – “I don’t know what’s happening, to be honest. It seems big…er than I thought”- are reaching for the form, in our cultural moment of TikTok, MAFS and very bad news.
“I think, people are in grief.” Or, Saunders says, “everyone I talk to feels like the world took a weird turn a few years ago. And I think, not to be too simple, historians will say the rise of social media has a lot to do with it. People are occupying the first three inches of their psyche all day. So, they’re agitated. They’re projecting. We’re stumbling towards darkness and the old artistic forms say something hopeful, which is, there’s more to you than you can sense right at this moment.”
Is there?
“There is. The stories are kind of a way of ritually guiding oneself to that deeper part of the psyche. So, it’s healing and it’s consoling and you think, thank God, I’m not just what I feel like on the surface. I’m actually deeper, more loving, I’m connected to everyone else and so are they.
“I certainly take a lot of comfort in that. When I was writing the Russian book, and this book, just to say, the surface me is so confused and grief-stricken and angry, you know, pissy – I’m pissy – but that deeper part is still ok. That deeper part is still hanging in there.”
Despite – what we talk about next – how he manages criticism: “When I was younger if anybody didn’t like my work, it killed me! And then you get older and you’re like, oh! Most people don’t like me!”
Despite the pressure that comes with literary success. There, “it’s very helpful to say I’m really trying so hard to honour my little talent. I’m just trying to honour it. And I’m going to put these books out with full intensity and sincerity. Some people are going to hate them. Some people like them. Most people will never hear of them. That’s all I can do.”
Despite the fact he will miss the house. And should really be packing at this point.
Still, he might ask before you go, if you’re writing another novel. And if you say sort of, but you’re very scared, things being a little bit different now, and you’re not sure you can do it, he might say well, all I know is you’re [a compliment to rival the first one] so you have to.
I said, ok, I will go and try, and hopefully meet back here in two years?
“Or four. Give yourself time.”
When the author who got you this far, the famous author who should not be interested, ends a phone interview with permission not to be anxious? Well then – when you listen back later – you’ll hear that you went in with a strangled yelp, and out with the most tremendous sigh of relief. You are very grateful.
George Saunders’ Liberation Day (Bloomsbury) is published on October 18. Meg Mason’s latest novel is Sorrow and Bliss.
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