A Story I Loved: "Sticks" by George Saunders
- Staff Writer
- Jun 27
- 3 min read
What good construction and a well-loved premise can do for a writer
“Sticks” was my first introduction to a George Saunders story, and some might call it a deceptive introduction. Later, when I read “Lincoln in the Bardo” and his collection “Tenth of December”, I realized how much “Sticks” omitted key Saunders characteristics- his wackiness with language, his ironic playfulness, his riskiness.
The story itself is very plain: about an authoritarian father who controls his children all his life, fussing over how much ketchup they use and what they eat on birthdays. His only joy is a pole in the front yard that he decorates with hockey jerseys and Santa Claus outfits as a kind of makeshift scarecrow. As he gets older, the pole is dressed with “less discernible logic” until it becomes a sort of proxy for human communication. The father, unable to say he is sorry to his children, utilizes the pole to convey his apologies and his regrets to his children. That is the gist of the story.
He is a mean man. But, he is, as the reader later discovers, the kind of meanness a person can become susceptible to over a lifetime. Later, the children move out and discover “seeds of meanness blooming” inside of themselves, as well. There is a chance for empathy there, a chance for mutual understanding. But no sign of whether it actually occurs, as the narrator concludes that his father dies “in the hall with the radio on” and the house is sold to a young couple who yanks out the pole.
Sticks, to me, shows how little of the writing we do can sometimes rest on an actual premise. Certain genres have everything to do with the incredulity of an imagined world, and language is used as a vehicle only to describe that world. When I read, for example, Asimov or Ted Chiang, their prose is often more efficient, bare-bones. Lovely in its own way, but not necessarily playing with how language can surprise us more than the way it can evoke an image with exacting clarity.
But Saunders does have some pretty wacky worlds- read any one of his short stories and you can see that his worlds always have an undercurrent of something else going on, so as to seem almost banal to a first glance, and then reveal deeper stirrings. Saunders’ early profession before he picked up fiction full-time, as a technical writer, also interests me. Technical writing is all about writing for a specific audience, and tailoring the language around that audience. The writing that results is quite precise, and not inventive by any means, but it does its one job: delivering a single message, very well.
I think that’s what Sticks is about. Delivering one message, very well. The story is not by any means inventive, and it rests on maybe the most cliched premise of all time: human miscommunication, human emotion. The story itself is so short as to be almost handicapped by its brevity. And yet Saunders makes it not so. He’s so skillful, chopping out all the fat, writing sentences as clean as bone, as Baldwin might have said. Different sentences hook at me, “earthquake hit Chile, only concession to glee, shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice, good enough good enough good enough.” And yet so much is packed into this paragraph of the story, with hints, specific details, the fact that the narrator never gives any conclusive judgement on the nature of his father’s soul. Writing, I think, is about just as much about words as it is paring words out of the sentence. This is a story where the simpleness very much works for it. Sometimes I will read a story and be able to appreciate it for its tactful brilliance and its way of saying things in such a way as to make certain things less obvious to a certain kind of reader. I don’t know. Is writing just about writing around things? About writing about the shadow rather than the meat of the story? Less is more, in Sticks’ case, though it may be cliched. Writers are not expected to be jacks of all trades, just a master of a singular one: language. Anybody who writes knows we are, for the most part, one-trick ponies. But it's OK. It's why we love to write, because on the privacy of the page, we can explore and dwell on a single emotion for all of time.
So that’s what Sticks means to me, in terms of writing. I think cleverness and plot construction has its time and place, and I can certainly appreciate it. But sincerity beats all. Love what you write, and understand it intimately. You're allowed to do just one thing. But the trick is doing it right, and pulling it off as perfectly as Saunders has here.
Related Resources:
“Sticks” by George Saunders