The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Saunders · ten stories in the order Saunders set · Random House, New York, 2013 · scored as one book on Saunders’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Satirical and realist stories under one voice; comic fable, speculative fiction and the suburban story of rescue
Mythos
The rescue, built in the title story, where a boy who has made himself a knight finds a real man to save and the man is saved by being needed; the prisoner who takes another’s torment and dies of it; persons made into ornament
Phase
Single days and single turns: a girl taken from her house, a chained boy seen from two sides, a drug refused, a winter morning on a frozen pond
Presentation
Fiction; ten stories, the first and the last each a rescue; close third person shifting among two or three minds, first-person narration, a dated diary, an office memorandum and a one-page chronicle
Register
The idioms of the brand, the memo and the self-help manual, taken on entire by a close third person; comic on the surface, and breaking into tenderness at the turns
Scale
One American present and one class band, seen through many minds: families, a workplace, a laboratory prison, a pond in winter
Governing Proposition
Ten stories, opening and closing on a rescue, in which ordinary Americans think in the idioms of the brand, the memo and the self-help manual: a boy who breaks every rule he was raised by to save the girl next door, a prisoner in a laboratory of administered feeling, a father who buys poor women as lawn ornaments, a dying man on a frozen pond. The wager of the book is that a close third person which takes on each borrowed idiom entire can show both how far a mind is furnished by language it did not make and the one act, made for another person, that the language cannot account for.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on a rescue. “Victory Lap” is told in a close third person that passes among three minds. A girl, Alison, narrates herself to herself as a heroine before an audience, in a theatrical inner voice. The boy next door, Kyle, thinks in the rules his parents have set him, and censors his own words in the act of thinking them. Then a man comes to the girl’s house to take her, and the prose enters his mind as well, in a diction and rhythm of its own. Each of the three is furnished by language: the girl by the theatre of her own self-narration, the boy by a household regime, and the man by nothing that could be called a training at all.
The boy sees the girl taken. To act he must break every rule he was raised by, and he breaks them; he strikes the abductor with a geode. Then he cannot stop, and the girl, whose rescue it was, must stop him. The story rises twice, first in the boy’s release and then, more dreadfully, in what the release lets loose. The rescue is the meeting of two trained consciousnesses with a third that has none, and every voice is needed for it: take away one of the three minds and the meeting cannot happen. The tender turn and the terrible one are given in the same few minutes.
The book was published by Random House, New York, in January 2013: ten stories in an order Saunders set, opening with “Victory Lap” and closing with “Tenth of December”, both stories of rescue. Its forms are various. Some stories are told in a close third person shifting among two or three minds; some are told in the first person; one is a dated diary, one an office memorandum, and one, “Sticks”, a chronicle of a single page. What joins them is announced in the first story. Each mind is entered in its own words, and the words are not its own.
Movement II
“Sticks”, much the oldest of the stories, is a single paragraph. A father, a pole in the yard, and the years. Through the pole the story tells the father’s whole life, his love for his family and his inability to speak it, in one page. It is the book’s proof of compression, and its plainest statement of a condition the longer stories explore at length: a man whose feeling can find no language but the one at hand, and whose one language is a thing in the yard.
In “Puppy” a well-off mother, Marie, comes to a poorer household and sees a boy chained in its yard. The story is told from inside her, in her own idiom, and her judgment of the boy’s mother forms in that idiom as she watches. It feels to her like compassion. Then the story turns, in its next section, to the boy’s mother, and shows the chain from her side: it is the best means she has of keeping her child safe. Nothing in the story remarks on the turn. The second section simply overturns the first, and the reader who has judged with Marie is left holding the judgment.
What the turn discloses can be stated, and it holds: judgment of the poor is a class reflex posing as compassion, and it comes from inside a mind that thinks itself generous. The structure says it and no one in the story does. The question it leaves is real, and a reader returns to it: whether the story condemns Marie or forgives her, since the language that misleads her is the language she was given. Both mothers are trying to keep a child safe. The book’s satire, at its best, has come close enough to its people to see that.
Movement III
“Escape from Spiderhead” is told in the first person by Jeff, a prisoner in a laboratory where drugs that alter feeling are tested on inmates. The trials run by protocol, and the protocol is spoken: “Drip on?” “Acknowledge.” A drug makes him love; its withdrawal takes the love away. The laboratory administers consciousness, and the story’s instrument is the language of the administering, the drug names and the forms of consent, set in the mouth of the man administered. His mind is furnished by the protocol as the other minds of the book are furnished by the brand and the memo.
Then he is asked to give Darkenfloxx, a drug that gives only torment, to another prisoner, and he refuses. To spare the other he gives it to himself, and dies of it. The voice continues past his death: it rises above the building, free of the protocol, in a lift the story has not prepared and does not need to. A prisoner takes the torment meant for another and dies of it, and there is an ascent after death. The pattern is old and it is built here, in a speculative laboratory whose speech is the speech of a pharmaceutical trial.
The corporate voice is the book’s widest register, and its weakness is that it returns. “Exhortation” is an office memorandum whose cheer carries a threat, and the threat lives in the cheer. “My Chivalric Fiasco” is told by a man who works in a staged chivalric world, and its chivalry is more a joke of diction than a structure. These restate in smaller compass what “Escape from Spiderhead” carries furthest, and the coinages, the drug names, the products and the euphemisms, recur from story to story as a manner and sometimes as a tic. In 2022 the story was filmed by Joseph Kosinski as Spiderhead.
Movement IV
“The Semplica Girl Diaries” is a dated diary kept by a father, addressed to readers in the future who will want to know how a family lived. His entries are clipped, their articles dropped, and his aspirations show through them, for his children and for the family’s standing. To spare his daughter shame he buys what the rich have: Semplica Girls, poor women from abroad, strung through the head on a line and displayed as ornaments on the lawn.
He records all this without seeing it. The horror lies in what the diarist writes down as ordinary, and the form is the only one that could carry it: told from outside, the story would be an allegory, and the reader would stand apart from it. Told in his entries, it is the record of a decent man who can live inside an atrocity his world has normalised, and who never breaks the language that makes it normal. The younger daughter sets the women free. Whether he ever learns from it the story leaves open, and the diarist, who never breaks his language, shows by failing what the other stories show by success.
The inheritance is plain: Twain and Vonnegut, Barthelme’s fabulist story, Gogol’s comic grotesque, and Saunders’s own manner from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000), the corporate dystopia and the speaker made of jargon. The turn here is in degree and in direction. The satire is brought close, and the minds it would once have mocked are entered and found to hold their goodness. The realist suburban story is opened to the same voice. In “Home” a soldier comes back from a war, and the state, otherwise glimpsed at the edges, enters the house with him.
Movement V
A winter morning. A boy crosses a frozen pond inside a fantasy: he is a knight in a war against the Nethers, and the girl he imagines rescuing is Suzanne Bledsoe. On a bench he finds a coat, left by a man who has come out into the cold to die, and he goes after its owner and goes through the ice. The man, Eber, is dying of an illness. He has rehearsed the speeches of a good death in his head, and now there is a boy in the water.
Eber goes into the water for him. The man who came to die is saved by being needed: the rescue of the boy rescues him from his plan, and each rescue answers the other. The boy’s fantasy and the man’s rehearsed speeches are both voices that run them, and against both each finds one act that is his own, made for another person. The story holds the pond, the ice and the cold water for pages, not for a sentence. At its close, with his wife come to find him, Eber chooses to go home and be cared for, and the book ends on a man who will let himself be helped.
The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2013, won The Story Prize, and in 2014 won the first Folio Prize. It has been in print throughout, is widely taught, and several of its stories have become standard teaching stories in their own right. Thirteen years have passed. The brand names and gadgets of its first decade have dated, and they are its matter as well as its date; its satire of administered consciousness and of persons made into products has read more pertinently since, not less. What it will become a longer time must show.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the strongest stories pass it within themselves. “Victory Lap” needs each of its three minds, the girl, the boy next door and the man who comes for her, because the rescue is the meeting of two trained consciousnesses with a third that has no training at all. “Tenth of December” needs both the boy’s fantasy and the dying man’s rehearsed speeches, because each rescue answers the other. “Sticks” is the book’s proof of compression: a father’s whole life, his love and its inarticulacy, told through a pole in the yard in one page. What holds the axis is the whole: “Exhortation” restates in miniature the corporate voice that other stories carry further, and the collection could lose a story or two with little changed.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the mind of an ordinary American is furnished by language it did not make, the idioms of the brand, the memo and the self-help manual, and moral action, when it comes, comes from inside that furnished mind. The action carries it. In “Puppy” a well-off mother sees a boy chained in a yard and judges his mother; the next section shows the chain is that mother’s best means of keeping her child safe, and the judgment is exposed as a class reflex posing as compassion. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries” a decent father buys poor women as lawn ornaments to spare his daughter shame, and never sees what he has done. Held at the gate, not above it: some turns are spoken, and the revelation on the ice and the prisoner’s last thoughts state what the action had shown.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The register is comic, and the elevation comes through it, often. “Victory Lap” rises when the boy breaks every rule he was raised by and strikes the abductor with a geode, and rises again, more dreadfully, when he cannot stop and the girl must stop him. “Escape from Spiderhead” reaches its height at its end, when the voice continues past the narrator’s death, above the building, in a lift the book has not prepared and does not need to. “Tenth of December” holds a frozen pond, a boy through the ice and a dying man in the cold water, and sustains its height for pages rather than for a sentence. Held below the higher figures because the comic surface caps several stories by design, and the heights are lyric reversals inside short forms, not a height held across a structure.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The patterns are present and partly built. The rescue is the book’s recurrent shape, and in the title story it bears weight: a boy who has made himself a knight in an imagined war, rescuing an imagined girl, finds a real man to rescue, and the man who came to die is saved by being needed. The descent into icy water and the return are load-bearing there. “Escape from Spiderhead” builds a passion: a prisoner who takes the torment meant for another and dies of it, with an ascent after death. The Semplica Girls are a new image of persons made into ornament. But much of the myth is evoked rather than borne: the chivalry of “My Chivalric Fiasco” is a joke of diction more than a structure, and the persons are types of the American middle and working classes more than figures who bear a pattern.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is Twain and Vonnegut, Barthelme’s fabulist story, Gogol’s comic grotesque and, nearest of all, Saunders’s own manner, fixed in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000): the corporate dystopia, the theme park, the speaker whose mind is made of jargon. The turn is in degree and in direction. The satire, which in the early books held its people at the distance of the grotesque, is brought close and made tender; the close third person moves inside minds a satirist would have mocked and finds their goodness there, and the realist suburban story is opened to the same voice. The stake was bounded: the author was established, the manner proven, and the move toward sincerity was one American fiction had been making for two decades. The wager was placed on a proven path, by the path’s own author.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes, story by story. The book knows that the mind is made of borrowed language, and its instrument is a close third person that takes on each mind’s idiom entire, so that the reader thinks for a page in the parents’ rule system or the diarist’s aspirations and feels the limit from inside. “The Semplica Girl Diaries” could be told only as a diary addressed to future readers, because the horror lies in what the diarist records without seeing; told from outside, it would be an allegory. “Exhortation” is a memo, and its threat lives in the memo’s cheer. “Escape from Spiderhead” uses the drug names and the protocol to show a consciousness administered. The variety of instruments is the argument. Held below the top because some forms repeat their effect, and the linked meaning of the whole is thematic rather than formal.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence first, and thirteen years supply little of it. The book is widely taught, in schools and writing programmes above all; “Escape from Spiderhead”, “Puppy”, “Victory Lap” and “Tenth of December” have become standard teaching stories, and they reward return at the level of the sentence, where the shift between two minds inside one paragraph is finely set. The questions are real but bounded: whether “Puppy” condemns or forgives Marie; what Eber’s choice to live is worth against the illness waiting at home; whether the diarist ever learns. Against this, the stories are built to turn once and land, and a reader who returns finds the turn already known; the criticism that would show depth across decades is still small, and largely about the author’s career rather than this book. Much of the figure is forecast, and the axis credits evidence over promise.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the American short story of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the satirical, jargon-voiced story could carry tenderness without losing its comedy, and made the close third person a place where a debased idiom and a moral act share one sentence. That widened an idiom more than it reorganised a form, and the idiom was the author’s own from the 1990s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book was received as an event unusual for a story collection, a bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the first Folio Prize; its manner became one of the most imitated in American writing programmes; and “Escape from Spiderhead” was filmed in 2022. Much of that reach belongs to a career begun twenty years earlier: the book confirmed a direction more than it redirected the field.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirteen years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout; nothing in its fabric is charged. Presence is continuous and, for a story collection, wide: it is taught, anthologised in part and translated, and its stories travel separately. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the brand names, the gadgets and the consumer idiom of the first decade of the century, which is the book’s matter and also its date. Against that, its satire of administered consciousness and of persons made into products has read more pertinently since publication, not less. Wide presence and nothing lost place it at the top of what its span allows; thirteen years demonstrate little, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice, and it is very high. In “Victory Lap” the prose moves between the girl’s theatrical self-narration and the boy’s self-censored, rule-bound inner speech, then into the abductor’s, each in its own diction and rhythm, without a seam. The diarist’s clipped entries, articles dropped and aspirations exposed, are sustained across a long story without faltering. The endings are set with care: the voice of “Escape from Spiderhead” continuing after death, the last turns of “Puppy” and “Tenth of December”. Held below the top on three charges: the coinages, the drug names, the products and the euphemisms, recur across stories as a manner and sometimes as a tic; the registers belong to one family of debased American idiom, so the range is narrower than it first appears; and the sentiment is at moments pressed, the tender turn reached for where it should arrive.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs the whole: consciousness is made of language it did not choose, and a moral act is a break in that language that the language cannot account for. Take the two most distant elements, the prison laboratory of “Escape from Spiderhead”, a speculative world of administered emotion, and the realist winter morning of “Tenth of December”. They obey the same law: Jeff and Eber each find, against the voices that run them, the protocol and the rehearsed deathbed speeches, one act that is theirs, and it is an act for another person. The diarist, who never breaks his language, confirms the law by failing it. The range is wide for a story collection, from the speculative to the domestic. Held where it is because the law is applied to each story somewhat separately, and the book is unsure in places whether its world is satirical exaggeration or the present plainly seen.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a book of stories holds. Consciousness, in many persons. The family, in nearly every story: the father of “Sticks”, the diarist and his daughters, the mother of the chained boy. Class, sharply, the precarious measured against the comfortable. Labour and the corporation, in the memo, the theme park and the laboratory. The state, at the edges: the returned soldier of “Home”, the prison. Medicine, in the trials and the terminal illness; immigration and global poverty, in the Semplica Girls; death, and the natural order in winter. They are integrated, not listed: each order presses on a mind’s language. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form and the vantage: history is thin, the state and the sacred are glimpsed, and every order is seen from inside one American present and one class band. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.7, then The Living Form at 8.6 and The Unconcealment at 8.5. A command of voice that moves among three minds in one story without a seam and sustains a diarist’s clipped entries across a long one; a variety of forms, the multi-voice close third person, the diary, the memorandum, each the instrument of what its story knows; and a disclosure that holds, that the ordinary American mind is furnished by language it did not make and that a moral act comes from inside it, carried by the turn of “Puppy” and the unseeing diary.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: consciousness, the family, class, labour and medicine are held and joined, each pressing on a mind’s language, but history is thin, the state and the sacred are glimpsed, and every order is seen from one American present and one class band. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.9: the rescue and the passion are built in two stories and evoked in the rest, and thirteen years show little of the return the stories are built to bear.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Imperishable at 8.1 falls four tenths short, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 five tenths short, and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it counts falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.2, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Saunders’s Tenth of December, stories, published by Random House, New York, in January 2013, scored as one work: ten stories in the order the author set, opening with “Victory Lap” and closing with “Tenth of December”. The stories argued from on this page are “Victory Lap”, “Sticks”, “Puppy”, “Escape from Spiderhead”, “Exhortation”, “Home”, “My Chivalric Fiasco”, “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Tenth of December”; one further short piece completes the ten, and no judgment here rests on it. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: two lines of the protocol in “Escape from Spiderhead”. Saunders’s earlier books are named as the manner this one turns, and the film Spiderhead (Joseph Kosinski, 2022) bears on reach only; neither is part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the first edition and of each story, the order of the stories between the first and the last, the magazines and dates in which they first appeared, and the title of the tenth piece, are not given. Citations are by story.