Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, my name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't. And it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in Wordle or Connections. Thank you.
Dana, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family. I think there tend to be two ways to know the novelist George Saunders. One is through his amazing novels and short story collections. Lincoln and the Bardo is, I think, one of my favorite books of all time.
The other is in his public-facing role as one of America's leading prophets, proselytizers of kindness. And this role is built on the virality of this beautiful commencement speech he gave some years ago about kindness.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was right there in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly, resolutely, mildly.
I've talked to Saunders about that speech. He was on the show in 2021 in an episode that many people tell me is their favorite.
I mean, I think one of the things that the left has to do is recognize that we really are at a very basic level defending virtues like kindness and decency and equality. To me, that's the thing we have to concentrate on, that actually we're the true defenders of the constitutional ideas that say we really are hopeful that we'll have a beautiful country where everybody is equal.
That's actually what we're working for. And don't get too distracted by the small storms.
And I've always thought of Saunders a little bit in that mode, the kindness guy. But reading his new novel, Vigil, which is about an oil tycoon on his deathbed being visited by angels and people from his past trying to get him to reassess his own life, I began to realize that Saunders is more interested in something else now, not kindness, but the question of judgment.
Not just how do we treat others, but how do we understand our own lives better? In this book, you can feel Saunders searching for bigger, darker game. This is a book about sin and judgment. It's about free will and whether or not we have it. And in it, there's a very fundamental tension between the side of Saunders that does not want to judge.
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Chapter 2: What themes does George Saunders explore in his new novel 'Vigil'?
There just isn't. So I think our culture is in a particular moment where we have sort of forgotten that for various reasons. So it's easy politically and maybe personally to think, if I just get enough of this thing, this power, then I'm safe. But that's clearly delusional.
And of this validation, I was thinking about reading that. you have a safer form of social acclaim. You're a novelist and a writer and very beloved, and people quote your work on kindness. And so there's a lot of social praise that has come into you. I have my own version of this. And it can be, I think, pretty easy if you're having a moment of self-doubt
to fall back on these things the world has told you about yourself. So I wondered when I read this whether any part of you identified with that prayer, the feelings within it.
Oh, I mean, when you write a book like this, everybody is you. And you both believe in them and you think they're full of it. That's the whole game of being a novelist. So in that part, I remember thinking, okay, George, if you were on your deathbed and some evidence was presented that you'd wasted your life, what would your response be?
And of course you want to think it would be, oh, I am corrected. But in fact, you double down, you say, yeah, but you know, I wrote books, you know? And so, so that's a big, big danger, I think for, for anybody. And certainly for me, you, the praise comes in and you accept it very happily and it inflates you. the blame comes in and you don't accept it quite so easily and you deflect it.
I find it to be the opposite. Oh, no, right.
That's right. That's a good point.
The praise goes off the back. Well, that's true, isn't it? And then it's like you get one mean comment and you're thinking about it for two weeks.
Yes, yes. But for sure, and one of the cool things about getting older, actually, is that you realize that Everything in the universe is giving you the memo that you're temporary, you know, and that you're on the way out. Your hairline, you know, your body, the way you feel. But then in a moment where you get praised, that information contradicts that somehow.
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Chapter 3: How does Saunders redefine kindness in his recent work?
Right, right. What I do is I research a bunch for a month. I just read everything I can find. And then I take notes and then I just put it away. The purpose of that is not to ever give someone's biography or to have a real-life basis, but just so that the invention is within the realm of the plausible.
And for the voice and the attitude in fiction, I'm always trying to find a corollary to that person in my mind and then try to build that corollary out. So with him taking that early oil experience, also kind of superimposing my writing life, the pride I feel in that and the investment I have in that. And then just sort of growing that out line by line.
And so the game is to kind of make sure that with each one of those, you've done them the service of really listening and really trying to inhabit the world through their point of view.
What are the years you're writing this book? What are the years?
Yeah, what are you writing? Kind of the last three, the last three.
So the last three years, I think specifically, have been a fight over what we should think. about the quote-unquote great men of history. You know, what should you think about? And this goes back before the last few years, but the last decade, let's call, which is certainly, I think, in your head. What should you think about the founding fathers of this country?
What should you think about somebody with a personality of Donald Trump? Clearly a man who has bent the river of history himself. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. I was just at the Frick Gallery. And I mean, what a beautiful gallery. And then you read a little bit about Henry Frick and, you know, there's a lot of, it's built on some blood. You know, that incredible museum.
And there's both the critique of them and then also in the period in which you're writing, specifically the backlash to that critique. The backlash to the idea that we have swept away the need for these conquerors, these human beings who are engines of a certain kind of progress. And you may not like what that progress requires, but But that is how we have America.
That is how we'll one day go to Mars. That is how we got to the moon. That it's not all nice. But there has been, I think, a cultural... Five years ago, ten years ago, it felt like the critique was winning. Now it feels like a very joined... And I'm curious how all this was sitting in your mind during it, if it was.
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Chapter 4: What is George Saunders' perspective on anger and judgment?
Forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world.
This is part of his self-conception. He is one of these people who have removed, to some degree, humanity from the mercy of the world.
Mm-hmm.
Tell me about the feelings, the argument, the life experience you're channeling there.
Well, there was a time when I was in my 20s that my dad had a restaurant and it burned down. So things were rough. And we were living in Texas. And I just got that first sense that in our country, if things got tough below a certain level, nobody was coming, you know, except your friends and family. And that landed on me.
I mean, I was kind of a upbeat, optimistic, at that time Ayn Rand kind of guy, but still it landed. And then many years later, when we had our family, you know, we didn't have any money saved. We were just kind of going paycheck to paycheck. That feeling kind of came back almost like a flashback. Oh God, you know, for all of the kind of surface glitter of the culture,
if you drop below a certain level, you're an embarrassment and the cavalry isn't coming. So I think, and I'll add a third thing. There was a, when I first got out of college, there was a friend of mine from high school and I went to visit him and he was living in his mom's basement and he had a good job and very like attractive, intelligent guy.
And the question kind of hovered over, like, why are you still with your moms, you know? And he said that he'd had certain experiences when he was young and they were very poor that were quite humiliating for him. And he'd internalized them and he said, I'm not moving out of this basement until I'm a millionaire.
And it really struck me because he was not somebody who was at all off-center or deficient in any way. He was a high-achieving guy, but that early pain had stung him. So I think that's what this guy's tapping into. Maybe in a more general sense, I think that's what capitalism is about, really.
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