11: Fox 8

A book by George Saunders

Round tables are crap at weddings. They are. No disputing it. Because of their geometry, if the person on your left and the person on your right decide, for whatever reason, to chat to the people on their left and right, you’re buggered. You have to sit there like a lemon, taking unnaturally long sips of your drink while pretending to admire the bunting, or eating with an unnerving intensity until such time as you have an opportunity to break into one of the neighbouring conversations. But on a rectangular table, there are no such issues. Here’s a diagram to illustrate my point:

On the round table, my only options are the third cousin on my left and the university friend on my right; anyone else is too far away. On the rectangular table, though, the potential conversational combinations are endless. 1 and 3 can chat behind 2 while 2 chats to 4, 5, and 6; 1, 8, 7, and 6 can have one conversation while 2, 3, 4, and 5 are on something else. There can even, on the right sized rectangular table, be just one chat going on in which everyone is involved, and you’ve suddenly built a support network capable of protecting the 16-year-old brother from parental repercussions when he’s vomiting in the bushes later.

Despite the obvious superiority of the rectangular table, though, there are many who still insist on going with round (I blame King Arthur). So I beseech you, next time you’re in a round-tabled situation, to see it as an opportunity for a supreme act of kindness. If you’re lucky enough to be engaged in a thrilling conversation with the person next to you, or perhaps even with both people either side of you, take the time to look up. If you spot a lemon who’s been, through no fault of their own, brutally isolated by the pro-round organisers of the event, bring them into your conversation with a “what d’you reckon?”, or a “what about you?”. The person you’re saving will be incredibly grateful, and George Saunders, author of Fox 8, will approve. In his convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, Saunders, who is now 61, said that looking back over the previous years of his life, his biggest regret was his “failures of kindness”. And failures of human kindness are an underlying theme of Fox 8, the Booker Prize-winning author’s charming but alarming fable from 2018 (beautifully illustrated by Chelsea Cardinal).

Less than 50 pages long, Fox 8 is styled as a letter from the eponymous character written, as he would have it, to “the Yumans”. Fox 8, you see, has learnt to “understand Yuman prety gud” by listening at a bedroom window to a mother telling stories to her children. As a result, he has a unique delivery and perspective, which Saunders often mines to brilliantly comic effect. Fox 8 is indignant to the “fawlse and even meen” stereotype of foxes being sly, and as for owl’s being wise: “Don’t make me laff!”

After inadvertently revealing his linguistic abilities to “gud pal” Fox 7, Fox 8 is asked for help by his troop’s Grate Leeder. A sign has appeared near their wood, “and upon that sine are some Yuman letters…What those werds said, is: Coming soon, FoxViewCommons.” What happens next is predictable, but brutal. Brutal enough that, despite appearances, this is not a children’s book. Fox 8 feels betrayed by the Yumans he previously defended to his friends as “nise” and “cul”, and with good reason. And he is writing his letter in a bid to find an “eksplanashun” for what has happened to him.

Saunders is not breaking any new ground here in terms of story. He is, quite clearly, making an environmental point, and in different hands Fox 8 could be preachy, twee, and/or trite. But it’s not. It’s inventive, relevant, and uncynical. The linguistic flourishes are often revelatory. Saunders has a lot of fun breaking down familiar words into their phonetic parts and repackaging them in unexpected ways, and Fox 8 is worth reading for this process alone. But its underlying message, as summed up by Fox 8, is also worth heeding again and again: “If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.”