George Saunders: "The Semplica Girl Diaries"

The American Dream.  Ah, the American dream. Back before the Internet, before Global Warming, before the housing bubble popped and Wall Street crashed, back in the days of Reaganomics and the AIDS epidemic and rich people on cocaine, the two most popular topics on which I was asked to write essays in grade school were "heroes" and "the American dream."  Back when I believed without skepticism in both, i.e. when I was a child, I also had the good training to believe in "goodness."  I remember claiming Mother Teresa for my hero (was this in 6th grade, or 7th?) and arguing that the American Dream meant that we should all have the opportunity to live happily, which would lead us to good lives, lives in which we were good to other people.

President Obama, in his inaugural address in 2009, drew on these ideas to try to reassure this country that we could be strong in the face of history, and against future trauma.  He said, "The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."  For these words, and for the spirit they represent, Obama is a new-age hero to many.  But in no uncertain terms, George Saunders, shows us that perhaps a different time has come.  A time to see how the dream is flawed, that it's not okay to pretend that it isn't.  How what people "deserve" fails (consistently, depressingly) to match what they get. 

Our country is wounded, Saunders demonstrates, and with stories like "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," "Sea Oak," "Winky," "The Barber's Unhappiness," "I CAN SPEAK!" and more recently, "Semplica Girl Diaries," he pours salt in the wound.  But not without also kissing us gently.  George Saunders's work requires us to consider hopelessness, but the stories published in his newest book, Tenth of December, also respond with hope.  In "Semplica Girl Diaries," there is Eva, a little girl whose big actions cause trouble.  I find her the most likeable character in the story.  She is not a bandage for the wound, but she is hope for tomorrow.

In 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, historian James Truslow Adams popularized the term "American Dream" in his book The Epic of America.  He penned that the American dream is "a dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."  He also wrote, "The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class."

Think of the Semplica Girls, hampered by the barriers.  Repressed by the social orders.  The harried mid-life narrator of the story, a father of three who struggles to get time to write in his diary, refers to them in shorthand, SG, and it is only slowly that the reader perceives the actual nature of these new immigrants, just the newest line of slaves to the American Dream.  George Saunders, a kind of hero in his presentation of the anti-hero, creates enough distance from today's immigrants that we can feel completely indignant and shocked.  At what point do we stop touting an American Dream that is reliant on consumption and material success?  Can we change its shape, its exigencies?  Is there a new dream to put in its place?  Does a dream have to hurt people?  Is it possible for us to lead good lives?  And for all you young writers: are you still dreaming the old American dream in your writing, or are you going to help challenge and change it in order to get us all off our microlines?

Finally a writerly observation on diction and syntax.  Saunders's particular, stylized language (in "The Semplica Girl Diaries" and elsewhere) is in itself a challenge and a change to the accepted, the cliche, and unexamined life.  What are the gains (or potential pitfalls) of such unusual grammar and word choice?