Tenth of December

As an offshoot of post-postmodernism, the New Sincerity school of artistic thought is a reaction against decades of cynicism and irony as a mode of literary meaning-making. The movement’s ideals were first outlined in David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” first published in 1993. The essay argues for a model of fiction writing that moves away from “hip posturing” and toward an embrace of intentional sentimentality, honesty, and addressing the common problems of humanity without the ironic distance that dominated from the 1960s through the 1990s. In literature, writers like Wallace, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Zadie Smith were early figures in this loose constellation of artists, but the school of thought is not limited to literature: the films of Wes Anderson, the music of Sufjan Stevens, and the portraiture of Kehinde Wiley could all be considered a part of the movement.

What connects all these artists is an employment of the tools of postmodernism toward an open embrace of emotion and putting high-minded values at the forefront of the work. This functions as an important counter-narrative to the development of postmodern irony as a standard way of navigating American life, particularly in online spaces. In the literature of New Sincerity, some elements of postmodernism are preserved, such as a belief that traditional narrative storytelling is a fabricated or broken way of seeing the world, an embrace of metafiction, and the acknowledgement that most meaning is subjective rather than objective. Where New Sincerity differs is in its thematic goals: While the postmodern writing of Jorge Luis Borges might present reality as abstract and self-referential, David Foster Wallace’s equally convoluted Infinite Jest (1996) presents that same idea as the central problem of humanity that must be overcome in order for people to be humane and empathetic. New Sincerity doesn’t reject that postmodernism is the dominant mode of being in the 20th and 21st century; instead, it asks what can be done about it. The central question of New Sincerity, then, is one of positive nihilism: If everything is broken or meaningless, how can humans build something meaningful?

The stories in Tenth of December seek to answer that question and are informed by Saunders’s earlier work and his Buddhist beliefs. The most important theme throughout the work is that Empathy is Difficult but Necessary Work, and Saunders takes an overtly moral approach to his characters and their inability to connect with each other, often putting them inside of fascistic systems or capitalist dystopias that are outsized representations of the contemporary era. By having his characters focus on perceived solutions to humanity’s suffering, such as unnecessary mood-altering drugs or designer displays of living young women, he demonstrates that these empty, manufactured desires are the cause of suffering—for the person who desires as well as the victims of those desires. In many of the stories, characters are presented with a moral dilemma—whether Kyle Boot should help Alison Pope despite it violating his parents’ rules; whether Jeff should choose to end his own life to prevent another’s suffering in “Escape from Spiderhead”; whether Al Roosten should admit his petty aggression—and Saunders uses that dilemma as an argument for the reader to witness. The stories in Tenth of December can be read as advocacy for a way of moving through the world, where the themes of each story approach didactic morals, though Saunders is careful to show compassion for characters who are not able to do the right thing. As a result, these stories demonstrate one of the most powerful, urgent concerns of New Sincerity: what it means to be a good person inside of a corrupting, violent system.