Samuel Beckett walks into a nail bar

It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you were when you first read it. I was in a parked car in a hilly suburb of Cardiff last summer when I first became aware of George Saunders, from reading a speech he’d addressed to his American students printed in that day’s edition of the International Herald Tribune. Within the first two or three lines it was evident that this was someone quite out of the ordinary, someone of unusual intelligence, curiosity and compassion. This speech — an exhortation to be kind — is wonderful. And so are these short stories, which have lately won the first Folio prize.

That said, they will not be to all tastes.  If Samuel Beckett had been a manicurist in a New Jersey nail bar, his plays might have come out sounding very like these stories. They make a great deal of play out of a flat, repetitive and idiomatic American speech, which can be as unpleasurable to read as it is to listen to. Concentration and patience are required, but the rewards are great. As with the voices in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, the babble of banality leads to glimpses of the tenderness, sorrow and beauty at the hidden heart of things.

And Saunders is also extremely funny.  His humour comes in (at least) two forms: in marvellous one-liners, generally delivered when his characters are speaking, as they often do, at cross purposes; and in the absurdist situations in which these individuals find themselves. The settings are a Saunders trademark, and range from bizarre theme parks to medical experiment laboratories. It may be the future, or some current dystopia: it is not so very different from contemporary America, but it is a place of great hardship and difficulty.