“Tenth of December: Stories” by George Saunders

It’s no surprise that George Saunders’ Tenth of December: Stories won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. The book was hailed by The New York Times Magazine as “the best book you’ll read this year.” “Tenth of December,” the title story from the collection, bursts with compassion and humor as it tells a story of Eber, a terminally ill man who goes off to die in the woods on a cold winter day, but instead finds moments of purpose and even joy in the last stages of cancer.

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Warning: This post contains spoilers.

As Eber wills himself into a quick death from hypothermia to spare his family from having to watch him die a more heinous and prolonged death, Robin, a chubby outcast on the verge of adolescence, is lumbering through the snow, lost in an imaginary adventure in his head. Robin notices Eber’s abandoned coat, and consumed by an innocent desire to be a hero and reunite the coat with its owner, makes a foolish decision to cross the frozen lake – and falls in.

“Now he saw that there could be still be many — many drops of happy — of good fellowship — ahead…”

Gathering up the fragments of strength he has left, Eber crawls to the boy’s rescue, and realizes that, “Suddenly he was not purely the dying guy who woke nights in the med bed thinking, ‘Make this not true make this not true…’” As Eber grasps the gravity of a young life in a frozen pond, his own fears and his disjointed thoughts no longer matter as he becomes a living man again with one goal: to save the child. George Saunders’ humor keeps the story unfolding without any melodrama, focusing instead on the emotions of the characters and the connection they discover through each other’s actions.

George Saunders
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Later, after Robin and his mother lead Eber to their house (the one that the dying man has often noticed at the edge of the woods without knowing that someday, it will contain his salvation), Eber suddenly understands how indispensable he and the boy are to one another. “Now he saw that there could be still be many — many drops of happy — of good fellowship — ahead…” Eber discovers an ardent will to live even in the process of dying. The story leaves the reader with a hope that someday Robin will understand just how much he had done for Eber by reminding him that even with Eber’s mental capacities waning, and with his body already moldering, Eber still has a right and a reason to be who he is.

“Suddenly he was not purely the dying guy who woke nights in the med bed thinking, ‘Make this not true make this not true’…”

The story was inspired by Saunders’ own pondering about what he might do if he was to succumb to a terminal illness. In his pondering, his imaginary death was interrupted by something stronger: a sense of connection that reminds the reader of the human goodness and shines through George Saunders’ Tenth of December and other stories in the collection.