The Falls by George Saunders (New Yorker fiction January 22, 1996)
December 15, 2021 9:27 PM Subscribe
Sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t even a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn’t a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness or perversion, humility was the thing. (archive)
New Yorker fiction podcast -- Will Mackin Reads George Saunders
Will Mackin joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Falls,” by George Saunders, which was published in The New Yorker in 1996. Mackin’s first book, “Bring Out the Dog,” was published in 2018 and won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
OP here. I *love* to be read to and Mackin is a good reader. But I would urge you to read The Falls before listening to anyone elses take. Saunders has a distinctive voice in his writing, and The Falls is an amazing read, an all-time favorite of mine.
New Yorker fiction podcast -- Will Mackin Reads George Saunders
Will Mackin joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Falls,” by George Saunders, which was published in The New Yorker in 1996. Mackin’s first book, “Bring Out the Dog,” was published in 2018 and won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
OP here. I *love* to be read to and Mackin is a good reader. But I would urge you to read The Falls before listening to anyone elses take. Saunders has a distinctive voice in his writing, and The Falls is an amazing read, an all-time favorite of mine.
is this a George Saunders thread? I read his book on russian short stories and fell in love. I'm working my way through "the understory" right now (taking a break to read the entire Wheel of Time series) and I'm finding his writing to be a little depressing. After having read the high regard he holds each single sentence, it's hard to turn my brain off when reading his work. "Why did he include this sentence? What is he trying to do in this page?" And, arriving at the end of the story, thinking "wait, that was it? He just wanted to make me feel... bad?"
posted by rebent at 7:20 AM on December 16, 2021
posted by rebent at 7:20 AM on December 16, 2021
I don't know that I've ever read a story that so accurately captured one's real stream of thought. I can't call it stream of consciousness because it's so much more solid and realistic than that makes me think of. Whew. Thank you so much for posting that. I have a lot of feelings about the story, but more so about the writing itself, which I'm going to be thinking about for a bit.
posted by Occula at 8:04 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Occula at 8:04 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Great read. Thanks for posting. The tiny little bit about Morse’s wife and the martial arts instructor was one of those single-sentence bummers that sticks with you. I wonder if Rob Delaney reads Saunders.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:05 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:05 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
The tiny little bit about Morse’s wife and the martial arts instructor was one of those single-sentence bummers that sticks with you.
I will always be grateful to George Saunders. When my child was in their 20s, something horrible was done to them that they did not tell me about, and they spun out of control, our relationship broke, and I almost lost them to self-inflicted death. I was able to reach them through a signed copy of “The Tenth of December”: talking about the book was the first trickle of conversation that allowed them to eventually talk about what happened to them.
George Saunders captures the honesty of the horrible things done to us that continue to live in our head and how we yet decide to default to the choice of compassionate action again and again. That infinite desire to matter and to do good in the eyes of ourselves and our world.
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:42 AM on December 16, 2021 [8 favorites]
I will always be grateful to George Saunders. When my child was in their 20s, something horrible was done to them that they did not tell me about, and they spun out of control, our relationship broke, and I almost lost them to self-inflicted death. I was able to reach them through a signed copy of “The Tenth of December”: talking about the book was the first trickle of conversation that allowed them to eventually talk about what happened to them.
George Saunders captures the honesty of the horrible things done to us that continue to live in our head and how we yet decide to default to the choice of compassionate action again and again. That infinite desire to matter and to do good in the eyes of ourselves and our world.
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:42 AM on December 16, 2021 [8 favorites]
George Saunders is currently doing a teaching project called Story Club via Substack. It's still probably early enough to get started if you're interested, as long as you hop in now.
posted by tangerine at 10:31 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tangerine at 10:31 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
Is this a George Saunders thread?
posted by rebent at 9:20 AM on December 16
Yes, it is a thread containing a short story written by Saunders, followed by a reading of the story by Will Mackin and then discussion about the story, hosted by Deborah Treisman. Best I heard it, each week The New Yorker selects great writers and asks them to read and then comment upon a story important to them; Mackin chose "The Falls."
While their discussion of the story -- which is widely known and loved by pretty much anyone who knows about it -- while their discussion was interesting, I kept thinking about that quote "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Take a beautifully written piece and then dissecting it, esp if it's not the author doing it, a person can find some facts but not really able to hold the piece.
It was my introduction to Saunders. It's really great.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:53 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by rebent at 9:20 AM on December 16
Yes, it is a thread containing a short story written by Saunders, followed by a reading of the story by Will Mackin and then discussion about the story, hosted by Deborah Treisman. Best I heard it, each week The New Yorker selects great writers and asks them to read and then comment upon a story important to them; Mackin chose "The Falls."
While their discussion of the story -- which is widely known and loved by pretty much anyone who knows about it -- while their discussion was interesting, I kept thinking about that quote "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Take a beautifully written piece and then dissecting it, esp if it's not the author doing it, a person can find some facts but not really able to hold the piece.
It was my introduction to Saunders. It's really great.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:53 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Silvery Fish mentioned "The Tenth Of December." I'm not sure why Saunders did this but he put it all online, free to read, no catches.
"The Tenth Of December" All ten stories, on Open Culture.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:38 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
"The Tenth Of December" All ten stories, on Open Culture.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:38 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
dancetoblue - thank you for sharing the link. I am going to send it to my child today without comment.
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:28 PM on December 16, 2021
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:28 PM on December 16, 2021
thank you for sharing the link. I am going to send it to my child today without comment.
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:28 PM on December 16
Damnit, it's three storys from "December 10" and seven other stories from different collections. Plz accept apology, I didn't look until *after* putting up that comment.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:46 PM on December 16, 2021
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:28 PM on December 16
Damnit, it's three storys from "December 10" and seven other stories from different collections. Plz accept apology, I didn't look until *after* putting up that comment.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:46 PM on December 16, 2021
Saunders talks about the creation of this story in one of the first installments of his new newsletter.
In this vein, I blurted out what is the first section of what would become “The Falls.” I was drawing on my own nervous, self-doubting monkey-minded tendency, ramping this up for comic effect and, in the process, was making this guy named Morse – a neurotic family guy, apparently walking home from work. I had a friend from my job in mind too – a certain gesture he would do, of throwing up his hands when he laughed. There was a sweet, self-doubting quality about him and I felt a kinship – we both had small kids at home and were doing our best not to fail them, I guess, by doing work that was hard and dull and keeping us away from those very kids.
I saw myself in him, I guess I would say – two nervous brothers-in-arms.
So, I took some of him and more of me and combined them to make Morse.
Then I just…printed those pages and put them in a manila folder I had on my desk for my fiction (hidden there among the Kodak files) – a two- or three-page scrap, in Times Roman 10 Pt (my preferred font, which I used, while writing at work, to distinguish my stories form the technical reports I was editing, which were in Times Roman 12 Pt).
Then, a few weeks later, I tried that same exercise but instead attempted to imagine the voice of a certain guy I’d seen around the village where we were living – he wore shorts in all weather, had this sort of Prince Valiant haircut, would walk around muttering to himself.
And this resulted in a second swath of text, about a guy named Cummings, a poet (of sorts), and those pages went into that same folder – a start, I thought, on the second story in my next book.
In both sections, I was doing something I’ve come to think of as “third-person omniscient.” The difference between this mode and “normal” third-person limited has something to do with the idea of trying to minimize or eliminate that omniscient presence that is located…nowhere. Who IS that omniscient narrator? I’m trying to get into the character’s head as fast as I can and (this is key) into his diction as fast as possible.
So the story starts out in third-person limited (“Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed…”) and then, with the next line (“because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert”) starts to edge into Morse’s diction - the words “wacko” and “pervert” are, subtly, his words, not “mine.”
Then I took six months off from writing, to catch up at work and at home and to do the sort of things writers have to do before a book comes out, like giving any interviews that come in (if we’re lucky), and doing the final edits, and…well, pacing nervously about one’s office worrying about reviews, when one should be tech-editing a report on cyanide contamination in a residential community.
When I came back to writing six months later, I just decided, for a reason I can’t remember, to merge those two sections into one story. I just, you know, pasted the Cummings section in after the Morse section in the same file, and then read them in that order, and suddenly those two men were in the same world (once I’d made a few adjustments, i.e., created a river for them both to walk along).
posted by stevil at 3:04 PM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
In this vein, I blurted out what is the first section of what would become “The Falls.” I was drawing on my own nervous, self-doubting monkey-minded tendency, ramping this up for comic effect and, in the process, was making this guy named Morse – a neurotic family guy, apparently walking home from work. I had a friend from my job in mind too – a certain gesture he would do, of throwing up his hands when he laughed. There was a sweet, self-doubting quality about him and I felt a kinship – we both had small kids at home and were doing our best not to fail them, I guess, by doing work that was hard and dull and keeping us away from those very kids.
I saw myself in him, I guess I would say – two nervous brothers-in-arms.
So, I took some of him and more of me and combined them to make Morse.
Then I just…printed those pages and put them in a manila folder I had on my desk for my fiction (hidden there among the Kodak files) – a two- or three-page scrap, in Times Roman 10 Pt (my preferred font, which I used, while writing at work, to distinguish my stories form the technical reports I was editing, which were in Times Roman 12 Pt).
Then, a few weeks later, I tried that same exercise but instead attempted to imagine the voice of a certain guy I’d seen around the village where we were living – he wore shorts in all weather, had this sort of Prince Valiant haircut, would walk around muttering to himself.
And this resulted in a second swath of text, about a guy named Cummings, a poet (of sorts), and those pages went into that same folder – a start, I thought, on the second story in my next book.
In both sections, I was doing something I’ve come to think of as “third-person omniscient.” The difference between this mode and “normal” third-person limited has something to do with the idea of trying to minimize or eliminate that omniscient presence that is located…nowhere. Who IS that omniscient narrator? I’m trying to get into the character’s head as fast as I can and (this is key) into his diction as fast as possible.
So the story starts out in third-person limited (“Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed…”) and then, with the next line (“because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert”) starts to edge into Morse’s diction - the words “wacko” and “pervert” are, subtly, his words, not “mine.”
Then I took six months off from writing, to catch up at work and at home and to do the sort of things writers have to do before a book comes out, like giving any interviews that come in (if we’re lucky), and doing the final edits, and…well, pacing nervously about one’s office worrying about reviews, when one should be tech-editing a report on cyanide contamination in a residential community.
When I came back to writing six months later, I just decided, for a reason I can’t remember, to merge those two sections into one story. I just, you know, pasted the Cummings section in after the Morse section in the same file, and then read them in that order, and suddenly those two men were in the same world (once I’d made a few adjustments, i.e., created a river for them both to walk along).
posted by stevil at 3:04 PM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
Saunders talks about the creation of this story in one of the first installments of his new newsletter.
posted by stevil at 5:04 PM on December 16
A great add to this thread, stevil -- thank you.
Since we're at The End Of The Thread it seems, I want to note something that I picked up from the Will Mackin back and forth with Deborah Treisman about the story in The New Yorker podcast. I read the story in 1996, and I've read it many, many times since, and not once in 25 years did I notice that there is not even one tiny bit of dialogue in the story. It was most all the inner thoughts and emotings of Morse and Cummings as they staggered through, burdened under the weight of being themselves, laid out against the two little girls in the canoe, the rolling river, and Knife World.
I absolutely disagreed with them on Cummings being so much lesser because of what he didn't do at the end of the story, which Morse did do. Morse at least knew swimming, he was experienced at swimming, and it's unfair -- to my mind anyways -- to put Cummings down because he was faced with something foreign to him as calculus is to me.
I couldn't write any of this earlier in the thread; to highlight or low-light either of the characters would be as bad as revealing the end being what it was, which, to me, is a huge part of what really made that story sing, and stuck it so damn deep into The Happy Part of My Art Heart -- Saunders had the guts to leave it, and us, without an answer. Pure Art, that is.
~~~~~
Yesterday was my 67th birthday. Putting this post up was My Birthday Present to MetaFilter -- Many Happy Returns, MetaFilter!
posted by dancestoblue at 7:58 PM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by stevil at 5:04 PM on December 16
A great add to this thread, stevil -- thank you.
Since we're at The End Of The Thread it seems, I want to note something that I picked up from the Will Mackin back and forth with Deborah Treisman about the story in The New Yorker podcast. I read the story in 1996, and I've read it many, many times since, and not once in 25 years did I notice that there is not even one tiny bit of dialogue in the story. It was most all the inner thoughts and emotings of Morse and Cummings as they staggered through, burdened under the weight of being themselves, laid out against the two little girls in the canoe, the rolling river, and Knife World.
I absolutely disagreed with them on Cummings being so much lesser because of what he didn't do at the end of the story, which Morse did do. Morse at least knew swimming, he was experienced at swimming, and it's unfair -- to my mind anyways -- to put Cummings down because he was faced with something foreign to him as calculus is to me.
I couldn't write any of this earlier in the thread; to highlight or low-light either of the characters would be as bad as revealing the end being what it was, which, to me, is a huge part of what really made that story sing, and stuck it so damn deep into The Happy Part of My Art Heart -- Saunders had the guts to leave it, and us, without an answer. Pure Art, that is.
~~~~~
Yesterday was my 67th birthday. Putting this post up was My Birthday Present to MetaFilter -- Many Happy Returns, MetaFilter!
posted by dancestoblue at 7:58 PM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
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