A Bit Like George Saunders

O says that what I write reminds him of George Saunders and hands me a book that I lug with me across the country on my backpack tour. I don’t dare read more than a little, because I don’t want to accidentally imitate George Saunders, whom I apparently already resemble, without even knowing it.

The first story is about a miserable hairdresser who stares at women and fantasises about them in provocative positions. It’s a story with no inhibitions, but I have every imaginable inhibition, so how could I possibly resemble George Saunders, who lets desire run wild and unchecked?

To understand what I don’t understand, I read an interview in The Paris Review, where the author talks about growing up and ending up at teenage parties, watching his friends get drunk and stumble around. Young George questioned the logic of it all, felt alienated and prematurely old, but maybe he got younger later, I think, when he wrote that thing about the hairdresser, as I try to find some common ground between us.

Because I don’t have a grandfather who, as a kid, was stopped on the streets of Chicago by someone saying: Hey boys, wanna try driving? Whereupon the driver jumped out of the car and ran off, while grandpa’s buddy eagerly climbed behind the wheel. Seconds later, another car pulled up alongside and riddled the driver’s seat with bullets. The friend died.

Nor do I have a father who, while hanging out with his buddies in the meatpacking district, came across a boy their age hanging from a hook, like a skinned pig. The kid was still alive, and they managed to wrench him down, and presumably the skinned boy lives on, with a healed-over hole in his flesh.

Just the kind of stuff that happened all the time, in Chicago. But even so, George didn’t like seeing his friends lose control, because he had an old soul, and that’s where we’re alike, so I can relate, just not to all the rest of it. Still, somehow we’ve become kin, O thinks, as he hands me the short story collection, and I accept it in the back seat outside Åby and start leafing through the pages, a little alarmed, because I know I’ll end up stealing all of it eventually, and maybe now is eventually.

And then I read about the voyeur hairdresser who, from his foldout chair, imagines sleeping with old women and pregnant women and women whose faces appear on bus ads, and one woman he pictures kneeling on a primitive Mexican sofa in a small adobe hut, daring him to take her (which he most certainly does: soon they’ve made love all the way to a bean field) (while a few gaucho guys strum muted guitars). But I would never write that kind of thing, because I’m too repressed. A little like George Saunders maybe, but also not at all.