My House by George Saunders, 2022
The magic trick:
Deep thoughts presented in mainstream-accessible ways
I really, really like this story a lot. It recalls his story “Adams” for me in the way that its metaphor seems very simple at first but in fact opens up to many different interpretations. Deceptively simple, I think they call that.
You start with something very familiar and realistic – a man looking to buy a house, in this case. And then you pitch the situation slightly weird. It’s not like crazy dystopia or science fiction at all. It’s not even magical realism. The dial is turned just a notch away from what we expected. It’s the same in “Adams,” though I guess all the womping of neighbors is a bit more than one notch in its weirdness. In “My House,” we just get some surprisingly creepy “Fall Of The House Of Usher” decay.
The result for the reader is that we now know that we likely aren’t supposed to take this as literally or realistically as perhaps we were at the start of the story. And so we start looking for metaphor and meaning. In some ways such an obvious cue for the reader makes this – and “Adams” – kind of basic. Almost like starter stories for the middle school reader dipping their toe into literary analysis.
But what’s so cool is that there’s nothing basic about what that literary analysis will lead you to. “Adams” might, yes, be about the Iraq War. But it also might be about toxic masculinity.
Here, maybe “My House” is the boomers failing to earn their American inheritance. Maybe it’s about Donald Trump. Maybe it’s about getting older and running out of time.
These are deep stories presented in ways that are accessible to the masses. And what’s better than that?
And that’s quite a trick on Saunders’s part.
The selection:
By the time we came back out onto the whole porch I had so admired from the road we were friends and the house, it seemed, was mine. There’s a family of foxes who come to sit over there in the arbor, he said. And: Those dogwoods flower white like crazy in early April. And: You’ll want to watch the basement walls for cracks in the winter.
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