Story for daughters grew into book for George Saunders

“I originally told this book to my daughters, so it was really improvised,” Saunders said in a recent phone interview. “And that’s one thing I really like about it. … It was me trying to really communicate with my kids in the moment. I could watch their reaction and see how I was doing.”

First published in 2000 and reissued last month, the story is set in the tiny town of Frip (population 9, in “three leaning shacks by the sea”). The story follows young Capable, who tries to rid her town of gappers, the bright orange, baseball-sized, many-eyed creatures that torment the local money-making goats.

Saunders entertained his daughters with more than 20 versions of the story, editing along the way, but he attributes its fable-like structure to knowing that he would include illustrations, which helped steer his imagination toward content that was “visually alive, leaning toward simplicity.”

Award-winning children’s illustrator Lane Smith, best known for “The Stinky Cheese Man” and “James and the Giant Peach,” was Saunders’ first choice.

“I knew his work and told my publisher, ‘Why don’t you get him?’ and they were like, ‘Well, sure … you’re going to have a wedding, why don’t you get the pope to do it?’ But, then, it turns out that Lane had read my collection ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’ not long before and was happy to take a look at the story. Then, he agreed to do it, and that was a real coup.

“It wasn’t collaboration in that we wrote it together, but we had a shared idea that Frip was a real place,” Saunders said. “Stuff was dirty and paint was peeling and people were really suffering, but, on the other hand, the art has an exaggerative metaphorical element to it. So, I thought it was a nice example of sincerity and irony working together.”

That combination of sincerity and irony also assures “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip” an adult audience — the book was even originally shelved in the fiction section of book stores. For example, when the gappers abandon the goats of two of Frip’s three families to plague only Capable’s, one neighbor pens a note to her: “Not that we’re saying we’re better than you, necessarily, it’s just that since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us.”

The tendency to think that success in life proves being “virtuous” very much occupied Saunders as he wrote. Both of his daughters were born after his wife was confined to months of bed rest, and neither birth was a surety.

“That most important of blessings really seemed to have come mostly by chance. So much of our success or accomplishments is just about luck, really, and there’s a kind of corresponding adjustment we have to make in our moral vision to accept that is true,” Saunders said.

As for Capable, who eventually solves her gapper problem with integrity and compassion?

“The impetus was to have a happy ending — I didn’t want to be a bummer right before bedtime,” Saunders recalled. “But you’re really trying to say to your kids that life is kind of beautiful and it might get hard for you — it will get hard for you — but you have resources to draw upon. And here’s a story of someone like you who drew upon those resources.”