Victory Lap by George Saunders

George Saunders Victory Lap appears in the October 5th issue of The New Yorker. There’s a lot of interest in this story. Kyle Beachy over on his Twitter site says he going to assign it to a class. My take is to separate why you should be interested in this story from why you shouldn’t.

This is a seven page story; allowing for some text leakage due to ads and New Yorker cartoons. (I wonder if I’m the only one who is sick of New Yorker cartoons.)

It’s a two-person plot plus a perpetrator of some violent action. There are parents as background figures. The story takes place in the suburbs which the parents sort-of blend into like they’re azalea bushes that talk.

The first fifth of the story presents Alison Pope. Then we have a larger section giving you another awesome character x-ray, this one of Kyle Boot. Two kids, suburbanites-in-training. A rapist intrudes on this closed-community idyll. Saunders nails his characters dead to rights.

How? Body language: Alison pauses at the top of her staircase. Right away you are wondering why she is pausing since people do not usually stop there.

GS pulled me up short…while I was wondering why Alison was pausing…by making a hypothetical statement: “Say the staircase was marble.” Hey, this is a realistic story, right? So why am I being forced into a speculation about the design of the staircase?

Okay, let’s speculate. A marble staircase is unlikely unless Alison lives at Versailles or her parents work for Goldman Sachs. It’s a way of getting into Alison’s head. It’s much smarter than saying: “Alison thinks that…” or “Allison was daydreaming that.”

Two pages on what’s inside a teenage girl’s head: Alison thinks she is special although not quite as special as Mother Teresa. Some sort of princess syndrome. Enjoy it while it lasts, kid.

The other kid is Kyle Boot. Pope? Boot? Are these names over the top? Almost. That’s why they’re so good. Kyle Boot sounds like “Kick Boot” and Alison Pope sounds like “Alleluia the Pope”. There was an American literary critic, Kenneth Burke, who was big on these kinds of rhetorical distortions. Maybe George Saunders has read him.

Kyle is a dutiful kid whose parents are obsessive-compulsives. There’s a clocklike indicator in Kyle’s house that tells whether family members are in or out. And Kyle’s parents have laid out his chores as if he were an inmate in a reform school.

He gets “work points” for the performance of tasks that can be cashed in for rewards like weed or alcohol…no I’m just kidding…the work points can be cashed in for dumb-ass rewards like 15 minutes of supervised TV. Does anyone really live this way? I’m tempted to say this is nonsense but JR has told us on this blog how he was brought up and it sounds similar to me.

Kyle gets upset that he uses dirty language inside his head. Since he’s upset about this, he can’t control the compulsion. It’s a great example of how GS can get inside his ordinary characters’ crazy interior worlds and…on the inside, we’re all crazy.

Beautiful stroke, it’s genius really: Kyle sees a suspicious character who ends up at Alison’s door. The character studies of Alison and Kyle, which have been presented serially, are now unified by the interpolation of this third character, an aspiring rapist. Kyle’s anxiety level hits flood tide as he suspects that his neighbor, Allison, is in jeopardy. The family in-or-out clock and his execution of a humongous list of household chores haven’t prepared him for crisis intervention like this.

If you’re thinking: why doesn’t Kyle just call 911? GS has deftly foreclosed that option. He has Kyle think that if he calls the authorities…first…it proves he witnessed the crime…and second…that he did nothing to save Alison. Faulty reasoning? But you’re a kid who gets credit for fulfilling assigned tasks, not for being a hero.

Let’s leave Kyle right there on the deck of his parent’s very neat house while he agonizes over whether he should try to save Alison.

Victory Lap, well-named, is a narrative of great technical brilliance, very funny, and attempting to be very moving. Careful preparation, both of the physical props and of the personalities of the players, mean that when the action, carefully modulated, is finally ready to reach high voltage; it ignites its charge by means of the shortest possible fuse. It’s as if Victory Lap was composed backwards; the finale imagined first and then the text worked in reverse to justify the ending.

Based upon what I’ve said, I guess you’d be surprised to find out that I was very dissatisfied with this story. But I felt I was choking on the saccharine taste it left in my mouth. It felt so Young Adult. There’s nothing wrong with YA literature except that I’m not a YA reader. I wanted to say: Grow up, Mr. Saunders.

The technique is superlative but it’s as if an expensive professional range was turned up full tilt in order to toast marshmallows.

This is a matter of taste. But I so long for an adult art. For a depiction of a society and a range and depth of imagination that is not provincial. And I long for a literature without zip codes. I’ll have to look elsewhere.

-DH

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