“One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice,” he recalls.

The narrator, looking back on this ritual, remembers the pinch of poverty in his father’s every gesture. In “Sticks,” a two-page masterpiece, a man recalls how his father turned a front-yard crèche into a year-round map of the regrets that haunted him. Saunders’ ear for language allows him to wrench tragic-comic poetry into extremely small, often grim spaces. Incredibly, switching into that boy’s mother’s point of view, Saunders brings us to the lip of understanding why a woman would do such a thing. In “Puppy,” a family going to adopt a dog from a poor woman find a boy chained to a tree like a dog. Like “Victory Lap,” many stories in The Tenth of December straddle two viewpoints, playing them off each other brilliantly. “Victory Lap,” the collection’s opener, concerns a young girl who is abducted and the over-parented boy across the street who, upon witnessing this occurrence, must decide whether he will break one of his father’s many rules to do something heroic. In the title story, a man dying of cancer pulls himself out of a destructive downward spiral when he has a chance to rescue someone in danger. While language frays in the face of extraordinary circumstances in The Tenth of December its characters do not.

What better means shifts from story to story, but it often circles back to an idea of goodness, or, empathy in action, not just words. This is a profound and sad book, about people in dire straits trying to do better. In his new book, The Tenth of December, he almost never does though.

George saunders 10th of december review