Archived Review:

reviewed by Peter Darbyshire, Lee Henderson, and Brian Panhuyzen

George Saunders is one of the most intriguing writers alive. His work is socially complex, critically engaging to both the academic and the casual reader, and has inspired a cult status not unlike that of Pynchon and Vonnegut. 

Is he writing genre or satire? What constitutes "Saundersesque?" What role does compassion play in his work? And like any gathering of an admiration society, what's your favourite piece? Novelists Henderson and Panhuyzen are lead into the fray by Crouching Ninja Darbyshire.

Lee Henderson is the award-winning author of Broken Record Technique. He lives in Vancouver, B.C. Brian Panhuyzen is the author of the short story collection The Death of the Moon. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

PETER: The thing that I love - and I mean love - about Saunders is the plain weirdness of his stories. When I first started reading the story "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" I really enjoyed its sense of humour and its absurdist take on America - it reminded me of that Baurdrillard comment that Disney World is necessary because it disguises the fact that all of America is Disney World (or something like that). I thought the story had a pretty good critical commentary going on underneath its surface as well, with the gangs terrorizing the theme park (I love the fact the gangs are multiethnic), the downsizing of the park, and the inevitable failure of nostalgia for the past in the face or real-world values. It struck me right away that Saunders was a writer who could pull off the trick of making his work both entertaining and critical. That said, the story didn't strike me as brilliant or revolutionary. I could see the Pynchon and DeLillo and Barthelme all lurking under the surface, and there was nothing really new about the society-as-simulacrum angle. But then out of nowhere Saunders throws in the civil war ghosts and their really whacked interaction with the world of the theme park. The whole story turned on that moment, I think, and the story I'd been reading became something else, something I can't quite figure out how to talk about. At any rate, at that point he had me - I was in SaundersLand. And he really kept me guessing with what was coming next, right up to the end, which I found both simple and startling. One of my favourite stories of all time. 

LEE: Saunders cracks me up, too. Super funny writer. I like some of his stuff more than others of his stuff. Like I like the "Institutional Monologues" that were in that boxed McSweeney's #4 - thought those were marvels of satiric imitation. Really, those were amazing. I also really like "The Barber's Unhappiness," the one with the barber who has all these daydreams about women that he sees walking down the street, and he constructs these indulgent narratives for how his and their lives connect and love blossoms, and then later their lives congeal, and resentment and jealousy and bickering set in, and he begins to hate these women. But the women, all they've actually done is walk past him, and the story is only really figments of this barber's loathsome imagination. That's terrific stuff. That's a comment on fiction writing. 

BRIAN: Saunders' strength is that his weirdness is instantly vernacular. I know I risk giving his publicist heart failure by saying this, but this ability is the true mark of an adept science fiction writer, which is exactly what Saunders is, although you will likely find his book planted firmly among straight fiction in the bookstore. Peter mentions Pynchon et. al., but I also think of Vonnegut. In the collection CivilWarLand we see mutants roaming the countryside, a virtual reality machine which transcribes and/or erases memory, and, in more than one story, ghosts. Kilgore Trout may have written these tales. The writing style itself, the abrupt sentences and simple diction, are reminiscent of Vonnegut too. I'm also reminded of Phillip K. Dick: the post-apocalyptic environments, the reality twists, the paranoia. 

What also strikes me is the role that compassion plays in his stories. His characters frequently feature a character or characters oppressed by bullies (one story is actually titled "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror"). Yet in story after story the oppressed protagonist comes to the aid of someone even less fortunate than himself. There's the character who cares for Boneless in the story "Isabelle," or the VR salon owner who offloads Mrs. Schwartz. The protagonist in the collection's title story actually attempts to understand and then console his heartless assailant. The rewards for this altruism are often punishing, as in the case of Jeffrey in "The 400-Pound CEO," who is incarcerated for killing the evil Tim to save the animal rights girl. Saunders' world is a distillation of the brutality of American culture, tuned slightly for the near future. It's an extrapolation of Michael Moore's America, armed and driven by institutional fear. But it is balanced by moving examples of abject folk driven to aid the tyrannized. 

LH: I think it's probably time Saunders buries the satiric theme-park concepts. So far he's made a career out of picking up where Michael Crichton's Westworld left off. Like with David Foster Wallace and his foot-and-endnotes, no one can safely do a bizarre theme park without looking too "Saundersesque," even Saunders. 

PD: Yeah, you're right about the theme-park concept. I was so excited about Pastoralia when it came out, but I was disappointed by the title story and the way it just seemed to replay the same themes as CivilWarLand. On the other hand, I really liked "Sea Oak" from Pastoralia. But what I really liked was less the theme park/simulacrum feel to it and more just the mood it evoked. There are little touches throughout that really sum up the desolation of modern city life, like the subsidized apartments with the "rear view of FedEx" and the guy who essentially thanks his boss for being fired because he doesn't want to burn any bridges. Nice. And the aunt who comes back to life from the dead in "Sea Oak" is a stronger character than all the ghosts in CivilWarLand and really integral to the story in a way that I'd say is the true "Saundersesque." 

Brian, you're dead-on in your comment that Saunders' work is very sci-fi, although I like the fact that it's genreless. I wish there were more of this kind of play in mainstream literature (I think Saunders qualifies as part of the mainstream pack, at least in the U.S.). I'm not so sure I agree with the compassion part of your reading though. There's certainly a lot of displays of compassion or attempts at empathy/understanding, but they're always very frustrated or qualified. The narrator does show some compassion for Mrs. Schwartz in "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz," for example, but that is undermined by his personal stake in downloading her memories later and selling them. It's as if Saunders can never leave let characters be truly altruistic.

Saunders also repeatedly collapses compassion together with, I don't know, transcendence (for lack of a better word). Characters are always having these little epiphanies in regards to each other, where they briefly manage to rise out of their own pathetic lives and see the bigger picture for a moment. But even these epiphanies amount to little. At the end of "CivilWarLand" we have an ending that's almost textbook American Lit: the destruction of society (a society anyway), apocalypse, and a moment of sheer transcendence. Except the narrator's sudden clear insight into his life and his understanding of others' lives doesn't tell us anything at all. I'm loath to elaborate more on this because I don't want to ruin the story for those who haven't read it. 

There's a similar process at work in "Sea Oak," in which the narrator gains all sorts of wisdom about life through his dead aunt, but he's really no further ahead at the end of the story than before she died. Characters repeatedly promise themselves that things are going to change throughout the stories, but it's clear to readers that there's no prospect of that, and the characters' naïve dreams become laughable. And we see where compassion gets the 400-pound CEO. It seems to me that Saunders links transcendence and compassion with fantasy rather than true epiphany in the stories. The 400-pound CEO even says as much at the end of his story, when he says he's incapable of transcending his horrible surroundings and then launches into a pathetic (but touching) fantasy about God apologizing for everything that's happened to him and giving him a new life as a thin, beautiful man to make up for it. His notion of a compassionate god is perhaps the biggest, most unrealistic fantasy in the book. 

Maybe it's that distillation of American culture you mentioned, the internalization of the values of ruthless corporatism and the consumption of fear (to quote Marilyn Manson from Bowling for Columbine) that leave no room in the mind for anything else.

BP: Pastoralia also disappointed me when it started by rehashing the settings and themes already explored in CivilWarLand; I really wanted to see Saunders cast his wit and imagination on something new. (Even in "Sea Oak" there is a "theme park" of sorts in the guise of Joysticks, the strip club where the booths are airplanes and the strippers are pilots.) Saunders explains the theme park impulse in an interview in The Atlantic Monthly (I love the definition of style as "an avoidance of your deficiencies"). 

I softened my position on Saunders' repetitive approach after reading the interview; it's something he came to through experimentation, and he's articulately conscious of its source. You have to forgive him when he does it so well. 

Pete, you admit that his work is sci-fi, and then note that it's genreless. I don't think you're contradicting yourself, because Saunders is writing satire, and you probably won't find Swift in the sci-fi section among the Star Wars knockoffs. Satire straddles the border between genres. But what specifically is Saunders satirizing? 

There are a couple of moments in "Sea Oak" that illustrate Saunders' view of America, one in particular which mentions Canada. It's a fascinating perspective from someone who lives just across the lake, in Rochester, N.Y. After discussing the perils of the Sea Oak apartments, the narrator explains, "If I had my way I'd move everybody up to Canada. It's nice there. Very polite." He explains that during a weekend visit two farmers fixed their flat tire, then bought them dinner, then started a college fund for the babies! Saunders is not interested in perpetuating the myth that the United States is the greatest country on Earth and everyone wants to live there. Later, the story provides a stark indictment of his country's pathology: "It's the freaking American way - you start in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole." And then there's the perfect Michael Moore perpetual fear concept, when the family watches on television "computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could," called, "The Worst That Could Happen." The parade of absurd calamities it features are hilarious.

Like Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Saunders is satirizing the American obsession with fear. And it isn't only mortal fear in these stories. It's fear of failure, fear of joblessness and poverty, fear of humiliation, fear of the boss, your subordinates, your family, your friends, roving bands of violent teens, raccoons, the dead. 

I think that's where the compassion enters. Pete, while I agree with your idea that in these stories fantasy generally exceeds epiphany when it comes to compassion and transcendence, I have to disagree with your cynical assertion that Saunders never lets his characters be purely altruistic. For example, if we return to "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz," we find that the narrator was providing VR entertainment to the ailing and grieving Mrs. Schwartz long before he thinks of offloading part of her memories for profit (profit which he ultimately uses to care for Mrs. Schwartz). And hang on, isn't there a perfect little compassionate epiphany at the end of "Isabelle," when the narrator is living with Boneless after rescuing her from the state home, "and the sum total of sadness in the world is less than it would have been," and then we learn the significance of the title? Even the novella "Bounty" doesn't play out its potential tragedy. 

Saunders says to me that in a world where everything is terrifying, the only hope is from the proffered hand. It's a balancing act, fear versus compassion. It doesn't always work out; at times ("The 400-Pound CEO") the scale tips the other way; at other times the compassion is begrudged (the end of "Downtrodden Mary"). Saunders acknowledges the superfluity of sorrow in the world, but he offers a counterpoint through altruism. 

LH: He's very kind-hearted, it's true. He's got endings like The Simpsons, where all the reversals of fortune are in some sense, righted, and the status quo has been shaken but not dismantled. I've always been a little flabbergasted about his career. Normally you don't expect people who write such oddball stories to immediately find patronage in The New Yorker and Harper's magazine. From what I've heard, and, yes, from experience, it's very fucking hard to get a story into either of those magazines. So I was a little surprised to read the novella from CivilWarLand as a folio in Harper's many years ago. I was like, Whoa! that's amazing. And the fact that most of the stories in that book were originally published in The New Yorker. I just really want to know how that happened. It's awesome. I don't begrudge him. I'm just very curious. I think that most young writers who would say they feel an affinity with Saunders would like to know. Do either of you know? 

PD: I have no idea how he managed to get those stories in those magazines. Maybe because they're just so damned different. And his stories do have a political dimension that's in synch with the editorial position of both those mags, I'd say. I don't begrudge him either. I prefer to read work like that in magazines. I have to admit, I rarely get more than a paragraph into any story in these magazines. I think the last one I actually finished was when Harper's published Adam Johnson's "Teen Sniper." I raved about it to everyone and bought the book as soon as it was available. And Johnson isn't so different from Saunders. Maybe they've just got brilliant agents. 

I actually really like the theme park concept in Saunders, but it's the sort of thing you can only use so many times, I think. I hope Saunders turns to some other device, because I think he's selling himself short by relying on that one. He's got too many other good ideas in his work. 

The Canada thing in "Sea Oak" cracked me up, but I wasn't sure how to read it. Was he using it to satirize the harshness of the American system by holding up an example of a society that turned out generous, community-minded people? Or was he mocking the very notion of Canada as a better society by cranking up the satire to the level of parody and making it totally ridiculous? Not sure, but either way I still like it. 

It's also an example of something Saunders does really well: the throwaway line. This is just a little aside, but it's funny and packed with critical commentary. I think my favourite is the civil war ghost getting into the argument with the project image of Jefferson Davis in "CivilWarLand." Saunders does this sort of thing all the time, and you can sense the labour that went into his stories to make every line count and make the stories as perfect as can be. 

But back to the fear and compassion bit: There are certainly altruistic moments all throughout Saunders' stories, but I'm never left with any sense of things about to get better for the characters. In fact, I'm usually left thinking things are getting even worse for them, even when they're desperately trying to convince themselves of their own happiness (such as in "The 400-Pound CEO"). The stories have all sorts of examples of empathy, but that empathy doesn't ever seem to lead to redemption or salvation or progress or whatever. Which is fine with me - it's what I actually like about the stories. I think if you had a feel-good ending here, that would really ruin the point of most of his stories. 

Anyway, we should probably wrap up with this one. How about we close with each of us picking our favourite Saunders story and explaining why. 

BP: Saunders's early success with The New Yorker (success which virtually guarantees that you can quit your day job) may have something to do with his creative writing instructor at Syracuse, Tobias Wolff, whose blurb (along with Pynchon's and Garrison Keillor's) adorns his books. It's not uncommon for an instructor of repute to recommend the work of his brightest students to journals, publishers, agents, etc., a move which offers a powerful boost up a writing career's greased ladder. I too will take pains to declare that I don't begrudge his success (which says, I suppose, that we heartily begrudge the success of some others); in fact, I am cheered that a writer who might have struggled for years in the pages of little experimental journals before coming to light - if at all - has achieved such broad success. His work is largely sci-fi, and most literary journals, at least in Canada, make a policy of declining anything vaguely speculative regardless of quality, unless the journal happens to be publishing a theme issue. Can you see Saunders' work in, say, The Fiddlehead?

There are pieces in Pastoralia ("Winky," "The End of FIRPO in the World," "The Falls") which contain nothing of the theme park themes, but we've barely mentioned them, perhaps because they are less successful than Saunders' other work. The characters in these tales are plagued by overactive imaginations; they ponder so relentlessly that they invent false truths based on sketchy data, and meanwhile grow oblivious to the reality around them. Think of the character of Morse in "The Falls." He's so busy contemplating how his conciliatory character is reflected in the way he was tricked in high school into painting his ass blue that he fails to properly consider, until it's too late, the precariousness of the situation for the girls who pass oarless in the canoe, heading for the falls. (Pete, I'm with you about compassion's futility here; the end of "The Falls" shows classic Saunders altruism. absolutely hopeless, yet enacted nevertheless. Certainly no feel-good ending here!)  Lee, you mention another of these "overthinking" tales, "The Barber's Unhappiness," in which the barber invents complex characters and predicts events based on a single, lecherous glance. I think you nailed it when you suggested that the characters themselves follow the process of writing fiction: the manufacture of grand lies from meagre facts. 

Peter also mentions the "throwaway" line, which I think illustrates Saunders' superfluity of ideas. Another example lies on page one of "CivilWarLand," the "Burn'n'Learn": "Their gimmick is a fully stocked library on the premises and as you tan you call out the name of any book you want to these high-school girls on roller-skates." (I can't help but picture Borges on a tanning bed with a cold drink while a bubblegum-popping teen hands him a volume of Don Quixote.) The idea gets one mention, never to appear again. Saunders does this not just for the opportunity of rapid social commentary, but also because his imagination is so rich he can afford to toss stuff like that aside. Sometimes I hate him. 

As for Canada's mention, I suggest that he's using the same distiller through which he pours the U.S. Against that vision of horror Canada must be a nation of enlightenment and generosity. He should move here.

I'm trying to decide which story is my favourite. I like the "gotcha" of "Pastoralia's" ending, but find that the memos from management tend to drag. I like "Sea Oak" too, for generally the same reasons Pete's elucidated. However, for its brevity and precision, because it contains a more potent altruism than Saunders' other works, and for its perfect, bittersweet ending, I choose "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz." 

LH: I LOVED "The Barber's Unhappiness" - that's a great story. I still think that the "Institutional Monologues" from issue 4 of McSweeney's remains my all-time favorite Saunders story (or stories, depending on how you want to look at it). Just the fact of how well he mimics institutional language, and the use of that stiff style to deepen the sadness quotient of each anecdote. It's painful. It's genius. Reading it gives me the same gleeful melancholia that Chris Ware delivers. I loved "Sea Oak," too. I think I love those stories that go beyond the theme park best, actually. To me, "Sea Oak" is magical in its weird layering of story and character and point of view. I hope I die before Saunders does, so that I never have to go through life knowing I won't read any more new stories from him. 

PD: I love "Sea Oak" more each time I read it, but I'd have to say my favourite is still "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." It's such a beautifully absurd take on contemporary America - it's hard to imagine a better story for a post-Enron world - but at the same time still manages to be touching and almost cathartic. Only almost though, which makes it even better. I'd put "Sea Oak" and "The 400-Pound CEO" in a tie for second place. If I were stranded in Nashville and could only have one book to read, CivilWarLand and Pastoralia would be it. 

A closing note: While we've been wondering what direction Saunders will take with his fiction, he's gone and written a wonderful piece of nonfiction for The New Yorker that's autobiographical yet intersects with his fiction. You can read the interview about the piece here. 

Let's leave the final word to Saunders: 

"There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go." 

Want to comment on this review? (discuss) 

George Saunders Land
Publisher
CivilWarLand
Pastoralia

Bookninja © Copyright 2003
ISSN: 123456789
The opinions expressed on this site are born of the specific vitriol and ichor spewing from the orifices of individual participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners, organizers, or other participants.