George Saunders and Deborah Treisman (Edited)

George Saunders has published four collections of stories,

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,

Pastoralia,

In Persuasion Nation,

and this year's best-selling Tenth of December,

which prompted the New York Times cover story,

titled, George Saunders has Written the Best Book

You'll Read This Year.

He's also the author of the essay collection,

The Braindead Megaphone,

the children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,

and the novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.

I just like reading those titles.

(all laugh)

This year, he was named one

of the 100 most influential people in the world,

by Time Magazine.

Yeah, hold on.

Oh, there's a tornado in Asia, hold on a second.

(audience laughs)

I got it, go ahead, it's good.

(audience laughs)

A satirist, a sociologist, and a stylist,

Saunders would never write a story

about the love between a boy and a girl,

when he could write a story about the love

between a boy and a girl who were being held hostage

in a futuristic test-marketing prison,

(audience laughs)

or a story about the love between a boy and a girl

pretending to be Neanderthals in a prehistoric theme park.

Saunders has a fictional terrain that ranges

from sinister drug trials to psychotic war veterans

to murdered polar bears,

but in his cartoonish dystopias,

there's always something forcefully and undeniably humane.

His backdrops thrill and entertain without ever interfering

with the emotional core of the work.

It's about love, it's about loyalty,

it's about fathers and mothers and husbands and wives

and children, working through the many difficult

and complex circumstances the world thrusts on them.

Saunders' grasp of the vernacular, or rather,

the many different forms of vernacular as it varies

between classes, races, and generations, is uncanny,

by making us hear how people talk,

he teaches us how people think.

His comedy is so linguistically creative,

so narratively absurd, and so realistically rendered,

that it's as if Henry James and Nabokov had had

a love triangle with Monty Python.

(George and audience laugh)

Please welcome George Saunders.

(audience applauds)

You grew up in Chicago.

You studied engineering and you worked

at many different things, from knuckle pulling

to roofing to seismic oil prospecting,

and you published your first book,

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, when you were 37,

which was a little late by current standards.

Or any standards, obviously.

Right, so how did--

(audience laughs)

How did you get there?

Well, I think, for me, as I'm getting older,

I'm thinking that my issue when I was younger was,

I didn't have a, I had some kind of tendency

which might be working-class,

to not understand that that which is interesting

to you is that which you should do.

Maybe it was a Catholic thing,

including, yeah, that which is fun for you,

you shouldn't do.

(audience laughs)

I just gave up.

I didn't study in high school, and I was flunking classes,

and I wasn't a drinker or a druggie,

I just was a little bit lost.

So then, went to engineering school,

kind of because I had these two really loving teachers

who picked me out of the crowd

and actually called for me;

they actually called the school,

this was in the '70s,

and said, this guy is a fuck-up, basically,

but he's not, he's a pretty good kid;

would you give him a chance?

And, weirdly, if you've ever done

college admissions recently, they said, yeah, maybe,

(Deborah and audience laugh)

and they said, well, what are his grades?

And they said, well, he flunked chemistry,

he got a D- in algebra, and he flunked trig,

but he's a great kid.

And so they said, well, why doesn't he go to summer school,

and they said, 18 hours in summer school,

which is a lot, all technical subjects,

and if he can get a B average, then we'll let him in.

The point was, I didn't really know what I was doing,

and then I went to Asia and worked.

I would say that the short answer is just, gradually

and then all at once, I always lit up when I was reading.

I always felt like I had strong opinions

about what I was reading, and that writerly feeling,

kind of like, I could never do that,

but I could do that, that double feeling.

You read Hemingway and go, how in the world does he do that?

And yet, something in me is responding to it

in a way that tells me I maybe could do something similar,

but that feeling just sort of grew over the years.

Maybe as I screwed up other things,

I wasn't a good engineer, I got sick in Asia,

and then I came home and beatnik-ed around

for a couple years, during which time my degree lapsed,

so when I was ready to go back--

[Deborah] They took it away from you?

Well, they didn't take it away, but you go in and say,

I've got a degree in geophysics,

and they say, but that was three years ago.

Yeah, what have you been doing since?

Well, you know, roofing and,

(audience laughs) and so,

at some point it became clear that,

not only did I have to choose,

but finally my heart was saying,

you really have to do this, and I gave into it,

and then I started to make progress.

At the same time you were were writing 500-page papers

on waste contamination and treatments and so on

at the firm you were working at,

did having to do that kind

of writing and editing do anything to your writing brains?

It helped it amazingly, actually,

because we would have, I was an editor,

and then you would have to write blocks of this text,

and the very technical, geological

or environmental engineering texts,

and the company didn't really like the idea

of having a tech writer.

It seemed extraneous or too much.

It was luxurious to have that.

So, you'd have hours allocated for that,

but they didn't really like it.

It wasn't supposed to be fancy.

You were supposed to be really cut to the bone.

So, a lot of that job ended up being mine,

this really close line edits.

If something was extraneous, you cut it;

if something was indirect, you cut it;

and then I would just go from that,

sometimes with a keystroke, to my own work,

and that really helped.

Somehow, that aesthetic, which, once you get into it,

as you know, 'cause you're a master of that kind of cutting,

is really intoxicating.

So, I would get into my stories and go,

what's that doing there?

That's an adjective, huh, I slash it.

(audience laughs)

I had one boss actually, who.

Actually, I sent my first story to The New Yorker in 1990,

and I got the coveted nice rejection.

Yeah, right, at that point there were

two different rejection forms.

Right, right, at least two.

One that was more encouraging, and the other one not.

Right, well, I just, to even get a form

at that point was a big deal, instead of just,

and I was so happy, just, I couldn't help it,

and so I went into the copy room and saw my boss there,

and I said, I have to show you this,

'cause they didn't know I was writing at work,

and I thought, oh, it'll be alright,

it's The New Yorker, he's gonna be so proud,

and I showed it to him, and he got this kinda look,

and I remember, it was the first time

I had heard this construction where you say, George, man,

he said, George, man,

(audience laughs)

Yes?

He said, we've been meaning to talk to you about your use

of corporate resources, so apparently it had gotten out.

Sometimes I would send a print job,

and it would be a story, and somebody would get there first,

so it was crushing, that at this moment

of incredible triumph, a nice rejection letter

from The New Yorker, (all laugh)

just so you know what kind of power you have.

[Deborah] Yeah, now I know everyone's so happy

to get rejected.

I mean, once you get there.

So then I'm normal.

But at that moment, to have him turn on me like that,

and what I basically said was, alright,

you have just given me a Radian Corporation grant

for the arts, and I'm gonna rob you blind.

(Deborah and audience laugh) Every time

I could get a couple extra hours

I would take from them.

Yeah, so in a couple years after that, in '92,

you did have a story taken by The New Yorker,

pulled from the proverbial slush pile,

it came out, Offloading from Mrs. Schwartz,

and a few years later,

you published CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

Did you quit the job?

Did it change your life?

It did, but the story was in '92, and no, I didn't quit,

I mean, I had to keep working,

and it became harder then,

because, people, now that it was really out,

and they suspected there might have been

some money involved, and so, at that point,

I was trying to finish the book,

and the whole time I would develop these different,

sometimes at lunch would be good,

'cause this particular secretary had

a really hot printer that would make it look really nice,

at this time, I had gotten into the thing

where I was taking a bus home,

so between five and 5:45, I could be in my office,

my office mate would of left,

and I could just crank for 45 minutes,

but that story came out, and there was an older engineer

who figured it out, and at 5:01 he would come to the door,

and he always wanted to talk about Zane Grey.

(Deborah and audience laugh) I don't know, he'd say,

you know, Zane Grey had a long time in the wilderness

where he didn't get published, and like--

(Deborah and audience laugh)

Yeah, I know, yeah, he's a great writer.

I love that Western stuff; that's the best.

Those Indians, wow, wow.

Yeah, I guess you just gotta be patient.

You just gotta really work it, don't ya>

Yeah, and I couldn't exactly say,

I mean, I was on my own time at that point,

but somehow I couldn't, anyway, yeah, yeah,

but so then that was from '92,

the book wasn't finished for another three years,

so that was still at work, and the time got a little harder.

I was in my 30s, and we had two daughters,

and I was starting to make a little progress in the company,

so I was kinda like, well, I don't know,

maybe I shouldn't, I don't want to burn my bridges,

so I was getting bigger jobs and more responsibility,

which then cut into the writing time,

so it was an interesting thing,

and then, when the book was sold,

I also had that second book, just a miniature version of it,

second-book anxiety, but then when the book did come out,

I just got a one-year offer from Syracuse to go teach,

and that was really the big change.

Although I still have dreams about that job.

This has all fallen away, and I have to go back,

and it's always that I don't know the programs now,

and everybody's like, oh, you're kind of a bigshot,

there for a while, weren't you?

(all laugh)

Well, I don't think I'm gonna give you a charge number.

Also, you're naked.

(all laugh)