George Saunders Reads “Thursday”

#short-story/experimental

Metadata

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• Publisher: The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker

• Published Date: 2023-06-05

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Next time

• Play with things I might've changed
• And things that I really liked, and trying to generalize them or use them in different contexts

Notes

Cover blurb

• An old, lonely man goes in for his usual Thursday memory playback sessions. But this one is different. The faces and places are familiar yet unfamiliar. He jumps back and forth in time.
• It's not a malfunction, but what is it? Maybe it's a nefarious attempt to use his abilities for evil. Or maybe it's a gift from God.

Summary

• A man is made to explore the memories of another man (without knowing why, though we find out later it's because Mrs. Dwyer wants to find her grandma).

Plot

• A man, Gerard (nice name, immediate association with geriatric, old, conservative...) visits his local memory facility as he does every week.
• We see him as a 13 year old child with a sister Clara in a dysfunctional family (a father who "pummels" the mother, more on this later) living in a suburban house on Plymouth Street.
• But then something weird happens (according to Gerard). We jump back 7 years to when he's 6. That's not supposed to happen.
  • Then, the mother calls him "David." That's really not supposed to happen
• We're brought back into the present, where Mrs. Dwyer (the therapist) is joined by a "Horace."
• We learn that this is a "special session" but not why. Also that they really should have asked for Gerard's permission
  • (At this point, I have some hunch that they're using Gerard for some crime/detective work. This is wrong, but... somewhat along the right direction)
• But then, without warning, they plunge him back into memories. This time he's just a toddler
• The issue though is that they want him to be going forward in time, not back.
• So, there's an interlude in the present where they're trying to figure things out, and Horace and Mrs. Dwyer reveal that they're trying to find Dwyer's grandma because they're in love and... idk, the reasoning seems a bit tenuous
  • They have David's brain, so Gerard's memories so far have been David's.
• Then Horace has an aha moment (I'm not quite sure what changed?) and they finally are able to go forward in time.
• We get a speed run through David's life, in and out of jobs and relationships and hairstyles, bitter at the world, often drunk. Only real person he cares about is his sister Clara.
• By now, David and Gerard have essentially mixed. Sometimes we hear David's thoughts, sometimes Gerard's.
  • We also get a runthrough of Gerard's life, how he's never had relationships or friends because he's too quick to judge them for being too un-Christian.
• We end with Geravid lying that he didn't find out where Clara is, and then going to where Clara is.
  • On a very hopeful note.
    • For David: an opportunity to reconnect with his sister.
    • For Gerard: finally able to have a chance at a friend. Someone he would've used to judge and shunned.

What I think is the why of this story

• My moral takeaways:
  • People are best when they understand each other. Especially very different people with very different beliefs.
  • We are our memories.
• Other purposes:
  • As an experimental exploration of free indirect discourse through two voices simultaneously

What I liked

The subtle ways that Saunders plays with time and perspective

• A third layer of voice within voice!

• Somehow a gradual shift from Gerard to David memory.

• Fully merged!

Miscellaneous quotes

• Clever show vs tell with the "up flights of stairs"!

What I disliked?

Idk. Need to read again.

Thoughts on particular choices that he made

• The lack of description of the "memory room" (brevity in writing)
  • Strength in choosing to leave out certain things.

How he presented domestic violence

I thought this was interesting. Because he always told it from the voice of a young child trying to make sense of it. Which is both interesting in that it gives a new language/perspective, and it lets us explore the psychology of a young child.

Another interesting thing is how he kept repeating the world "pummeling". This was essentially the only word he used to describe domestic violence.

• This can be seen as a psychological tick: something David uses to euphemize it. To make his own "pummeling" feel like it's just the same thing as the playful pummeling his parents did back in the day.
• Or as a literary trick: because pummeling maybe is a little playful and unclear, it's a word such that, initially it's meaning is a bit ambiguous. But via in-context learning, we begin to associate with domestic violence.
  • Related to the purpose of art is to fill in association or meaning space
    • This is an internal version of this. Where, maybe this doesn't change how we think of the word pummel in general, but how context really lends new meaning to a word.
    • Though perhaps now that I've read this, I'm more likely to associate pummel with domestic violence. the power of writing!

Questions that remained

• [?] Why did Dwyer and Horace really want to find Clara?

• [?] What did Horace figure out that let them go forward in time?

• [?] Any significant to Thursday?

Ideas for what I would do differently

• Title?
• The way he handled the different thoughts?

Playing with particular things that I liked

My prediction on the thought process

Raw

Raw Thoughts

• He does a lot of cool stuff I think, just in terms of prose/style
• Also cool things with the structure
• It seems like the point of this story is a combination of just exploring a new way of writing a story (not just unreliable narrator, but a mixed narrator who's somehow one person still) and a speculative premise
• TODO
  • Comment on things I liked/disliked in
    • Prose and style
    • Structure
    • Premiseß

During reading

• This is very scifi-y! I like it.
  • But... I guess not very realistic, but that's not the point in this case.
    • Story that spans the gamut between realistic scifi to scifi that's meant to explore human aspect so not realisetic
• I guess maybe this marks a turn in style from the more showman-y style to a more realism based style. Less flashy words and more just "this is how people think and speak"
  • Is this related to social annealing/the purpose of art is to fill in association or meaning space?
  • Is this only possible because we now have more of a shared language/shared way of thinking?
    • [?] Can check this by reading more earlier literature and seeing what internal monologues sounded like

Highlights

Here it comes. Yes, here it came. Yes.
Note: Interesting…

based on the shirt I was wearing, red, white and blue peace sign in the center like a bullseye. I was 13, Clara, ten.
Note: He’s… sick? Dying? Or just having a bad life?

Thursdays are the day for this release.

Why Thursday?

yet was happening for the first time, something in the quality of the light seemed to be making promises regarding our future. Life would continue to be what it had always been for us a perpetual opening out and out and out.

early on, countless generations of men in crude leather sandals had driven swords into other men in sandals. As the downtrodden women of the stabbed men looked on, dreading their coming ravishment, after which some slightly more sophisticated men in leggings and cravats had driven sabers into some other men in leggings and cravats, as their downtrodden women coughed into delicate handkerchiefs, dreading their coming ravishment.

Or so I felt lying on my childhood lawn beside my sister Clara. Soon I would go inside for a drink. I knew this.
Note: Very seemless shifting between past self and present self

ignorant of the future, the right side of my face slightly more sunwarm than the left.

Pummeling would be something we ourselves might consider doing should we be placed under sufficient duress.
Note: I’m kinda confused… it this domestic violence?

As for Clara, in the future, she would more than once find herself being pummeled and not objecting to it, in the belief, the seed of which had just been planted, that being pummeled did not mean she was unloved and in fact, might very well mean the opposite.
Note: Ah… yes so domestic violence

We both knew with absolute certainty that we would never drink, and yet we would, causing much misery for ourselves and others over the course of the rocky, confused decades to come.

What's that? David? Mom yelled from upstairs.

Then again, I was six. Do I really still want this baby toy in my room? Mr. Petey looked up sadly. Baby toy, he thought. That is, I had him think back then.
Note: Nice!
Kids do this for theory of mind practice

The revelation that his mother had been cheating with his father's brother uncle Rod.
Note: Woah

Woah

Horace is here, Gerard, she said. You know Horace, right?
Note: Wasn’t his name David?

Seemed like something a young person might need to know a little something about. If a Coke was on the blue table, I'd reach up, palm the can, pretending to be a grown up about to pick it up, and Coke tasted amazing. Like a drink that bites you back, mom would say, sneaking me a tiny sip, matching my tiny sip with a long slurp from her drink, her alcohol drink. Cheers, kiddo. She'd slur seed the day. Those were wild times back then. Wild, scary, uncontrolled. Wait, wait.
Note: Wow. Amazing

toucans, had come crashing down, causing toddler me to skedaddle, which elicited howls of tipsy laughter from mom and dad. Gerard, Horace said, let us, if we may, say a single word to you. A few weeks after the cabinet crashed, clara was born, and they let me hold her.

had loved me more purely and disinterestedly than anyone I'd ever known.

Which is where you come in, Gerard, Horace said. David Marker died last April. Somewhere in there, in his brain would have been, or still is, we assume, some possible residual knowledge of his sister's whereabouts.
Note: Why do they care about Clara? Why didn't they ask David before?

Why, of all their clients, had they chosen me? Well, I thought I knew why. I was old. Old and lonely. I left my small apartment only to come here for these treatments or go to the market
Note: Seems oddly honest

I had once owned a small business translating Christian texts into foreign languages, had traveled widely in Europe and Asia, had been, for a time, friends with a local television personality, used to dash up flights of stairs to meet colleagues for dinner, had happily picked up many a tab.
Note: Why this?
Why "up flights of stairs"? I guess that's where the fancy dinners are? That's pretty clever show vs tell

The Torino gifted to mom by one of her lovers, either Steve B or Derek, a total piece of crap she'd passed on to me the minute it started needing repairs, and thereafter always referred to as that sweet ride I bought you.
Note: Nice

Here came the click again, that jaw click down my spine.

I had pummeled someone or been pummeled.
Note: Really playing into repetition.

But if anybody felt like judging me, David such as, for example, him, Gerard, i, David, might just point out, all due respect, that he, Gerard, had always been cautious to a fault.
Note: Interesting! Conversation between David and Gerard now

This was, in a sense, a form of Christian love. To know how to behave in order to put others at ease as opposed to holding one's fork like a cudgel

Friendships had likewise been difficult. Markle, the local television personality whose inability to return my phone messages in a timely manner a result, I felt, of the arrogance related to his very mild fame caused me ultimately to end. Our acquaintance Eric, a former employee and an agnostic who repeatedly rebuffed me when I invited him and his young family to our church, then quit the company in a huff simply because, in a gesture of friendship as his marriage was ending, I suggested that it might have been his very failure to bring God into his family that had doomed it.
Note: Interesting that he finally gives us more of Gerard's real personality now. I guess it wasn't so relevant earlier. But earlier, I'd started to paint in my head a picture that now has to be revised.
I guess the Christian stuff I had internalized. But was quick to assume that that meant Gerard (especially with the Coke) was now out of the grasp of Christianity and his own man.
But, maybe should've seen it coming what with his loneliness and this being the only place he comes.

A cautious, judgmental, prig, superior, cold, aloof, impossible to love, hence friendless in old age.
Note: Ambiguous: whose thought is this?? Nice

I requested I destroy the note and not tell anyone that I had heard from her. Not even her kids. Especially not her kids or her grandkids. They'd tell Lewis.
Note: Gerard gonna sympathize and also not tell Horace or Ms. Dwyer. Especially since they did all this without his permission

Lewis had them eating out of his hand. That sneaky turd never laid a finger on her if the kids or grandkids were around.

it occurred to me, to us, to David and me, to be quiet,

I reached for the empty Coke, tried to drink from it, shook the can around as if shaking it might miraculously refill it.
Note: Example of "butt of joke."
Sanders definitely just had this observation once that people shake empty bottles, and was like, "yea, let's make fun of that."
Like the "I'm going, if you're down" type thing I wanna make fun of

As I did, there came from inside the unmistakable smell of her her perfume, her clothes, the food she liked to cook, gosh.
Note: I was suspecting, but it'd be pretty fucked up if they got together, given that he's kinda David now. But probably gonna just be more of a friends thing. Being less lonely

Equipped as I would be with his Gerard's words, his inexplicable self confidence i, Gerard, would have what I sorely needed a pal, a platonic confidant. Someone I might, because of our long history with her, at least be somewhat able to tolerate.
Note: All the pronouns! Fun