George Saunders is probably the only National Magazine Award winner and best-selling short-story author to have spent time on an oil-exploration crew in the jungles of Sumatra. A former geophysical engineer and tech writer, Saunders has contributed more than thirty-five pieces to The New Yorker since 1992. This past week, he won both the Story Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize for his latest collection, “Tenth of December.” As Michiko Kakutani remarked in an early review of his first story collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” Saunders writes like “the illegitimate offspring of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut.” Much of his work is precariously balanced between the grim and the whimsical. Like Vonnegut, he scrutinizes the all-too-strange corners of American life.
“Jon,” one of my favorite Saunders stories, takes place in a marketing dystopia. Teen-agers live in a pristine facility where they want for nothing; their only job is to assess new commercial products. Fed a diet of soothing drugs to keep them happy and productive, they are treated like minor celebrities, with their images depicted on popular trading cards. Moreover, they are fitted with microchips that play advertisements in their heads. These ads substitute for their memories—possibly providing them with better recollections than reality ever could. One of the teen-agers, Jon, falls in love with another, Carolyn, and the couple is soon forced to decide whether to stay in the safe confines of the facility or disconnect their chips and brave the unfamiliar outside world:
In a recent discussion with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, Saunders said that he began incorporating strange and surreal elements into his work as a way of liberating himself from the habits he’d developed while writing “realism.” And although “Jon” is a satire about advertising and consumerism, it’s also about the difficulties and challenges of freeing ourselves from prevailing cultural norms. The story explores the price of self-expression—and the ways in which our memories can diminish, or deepen, our present reality.
The entire story is available to everyone in our online archive. If you would like to read more from Saunders, you can take a look at his short stories “Puppy” (2007) and “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” (2012), both now unlocked. You can also watch George Saunders talk about intuition, drama, and the art of crafting a character.
Photograph by David Levenson/Getty.