Recently I found the text of an interview I did a few years ago with American short story writer, novelist and satirist George Saunders. I was writing an article for The Progressive magazine about the “political” nature of his work, our conversation, by email, ended up covering lots of other ground as well. Saunders was lovely to “talk” to and very generous with his time. Since The Progressive obviously couldn’t use all of it, he gave me permission to post the interview online, but I didn’t have a blog until now. So, here it is. Please feel free to take a look. The resulting article is at the end.
George Saunders Interview with Nina Siegal
March 2006
Q: I sense in your work a willingness to critique American culture both
subtly and overtly. How do you feel about being called a “political” writer? And
if you are political, how so?
A: Well, I’m a little leery of that term, only because it often means
“someone who is advocating, through fiction, a particular political
view.” This is death, for storytelling, because it implies a kind of
incuriosity. Fiction should always be saying “on the other hand;”
complicating our habitual view of things. Also, fiction doesn’t
advocate very effectively, simply because the deck is stacked: You’re
creating a world, and the rules by which that world works, so it’s easy
to make things come out your way. (Look! All the redheads ARE evil,
just like I said!) And readers feel this, I think, and pull away. As
they should.
But having said that, I’ll also say I believe the primary work that
stories do is ethical. That is, you take a character and put him in a
shitstorm, and see how (and what) he does. If you design the shitstorm
right, this becomes a meditation on our plight here on earth. Which is
by its nature ‘political,’ ie, about the search for The Decent, an
examination of the question: What is it that disturbs our grace and
makes us behave badly? And in our time - with our big media and all
pervasive government - the answer to this question often feels
political.
I think the main thing fiction does is rev up the quality of our
awareness, make us more involved in the world, more enamored of it.
And this feels political maybe, especially in a culture like ours,
where so much of what we do is infused with dullness and materialist
sloth. Fiction is a way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves,
which is a radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that
voice and forcing it into acquiescence.
As far as critiquing American culture, you bet. Although I hope
there’s also a note of praise in there as well, of celebration. I am
befuddled and charmed by America, in addition to being irritated by,
and impatient with, it.
Q: Next, maybe you can you talk a little bit about your fascination
with theme parks. Do your futuristic or absurdist visions of them
express some vision of America’s dystopian evolution? Or how would you
describe what they represent?
A: Honestly, I just started writing them because I had so much fun
doing it. The conceit of setting a story in a theme park. I don’t know.
It made me write in a more compressed, edgy way, helped me break free
of certain realist tics I’d acquired. It was an accident. And then the
political overtones were there, but at first I kind of didn’t realize
it. I mean, now I can see all the ways that a “theme park” is
“metaphorical” and all of that - but first it has to be a real theme
park, with real people in it (”real” in the sense of: a viable, albeit
distorted, scale model of an actual theme park and actual people).
(A little PS to the above):
In terms of this new book - I think it is political, in the sense that
it is kind of a poem to America - this new weird America we’ve made,
drifting toward lying and manipulation and corporate sub-nations and
consumerism in ways both beautiful and sinister. And I confess: Ever
since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed and in love with the idea of
America. I used to sit around drawing flags, etc. Used to (and still
do) sit around wondering “What is America really all about” and “Is
America ultimately a good thing or a bad thing?” and “What’s good about
us?” and “What’s bad?” And lately I think we don’t really know what we
stand for anymore. After 9/11 we were: the scared country that wasn’t
going to get burned again. Then we became: Those guys who believe in
Freedom above all else, but won’t be bothered to define the term. So
what I think we’re in need of is a vision or a goal that is in scale
with our capabilities; in the absence of that, we’re going to have
issues, in the same way that a very powerful person with nothing to do
that might lift himself out of himself, is going to have issues.
Q: Gosh, it’s really wonderful to get a chance to correspond with you
like this…
A: Likewise! And feel free to tell me if I’m being too long-winded.
You’re asking really interesting questions.
Q: In any case, picking up where we left off, in terms of the new book,
how do you see it as a continuation or evolution from where you’ve been
before? Are you going deeper into similar territory, or are you feeling
somehow freer to explore things that you only sort of touched on
before? Or are you trying things you somehow feared trying in the past?
A: One thing I like about writing story collections is that they are
almost impossible to plan. Because they’re made up of X number of
small projects, most of your energy is spent on trying to make those
small projects work. And then you look up and those X number of
stories are saying something when taken as a group, something you
didn’t plan on saying, something you didn’t know you knew, and
(hopefully) something that is more complicated and nuanced than any
pithy reduction of it you can come up with. So I guess I’d say I
hope the answer to each of your questions above is yes.
The one thing I am proud of about this book is that I wrote many of the
stories out of a kind of ragged anger/sadness about what was going on
in our country. And I wasn’t sure that was allowed.my artistic
instincts told me it maybe wasn’t (this may reference your question
above about fiction writers being wary of being accused of being
political). But finally I opted to believe that if I was feeling it,
there must be a way for it to be used in stories. So whatever virtues
or defects the collection has come out of this experiment.
Q: Also, you seem to be particularly comfortable in the novella form, a
fiction category that I’ve heard lots of people call unsaleable. What’s
your attraction to the novella? And who are some of the novella writers
you’ve considered your big influences (if there are any).
A: I’ve never really studied novellas especially. I like some of
Tolstoy’s longer stories, which border on novellas (Master and Man, The
Kreutzer Sonata). I love “The Overcoat,” which is pretty long. My
guess is that this issue of being comfortable in a form is parallel to
the fast-twitch/slow-twitch thing in sports..a person has a kind of
natural frequency in which they write, that in turn suggests a
form/length.
Q: I’ve seen you compared to Orwell in several places, particularly
Animal Farm. What do you make of that? And how do you feel about the
comparison?
A: Well, I’m always happy to be compared to Orwell, even though it
will always involve, once the comparison is made, him standing
victoriously with his foot on my chest, twitching that little mustache
of his. The last book (”The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil”) got
lumped in with Animal Farm, mainly because it was on the book jacket,
but I’m not able to write the kind of linear satire that he does so
brilliantly in that book. What I do, I think, is exaggerate certain
human tendencies and make a kind of distorted image of the “real” world
- but the image is inconsistently distorted, more fun-house mirror than
shrinking ray..like a scale-model, but melted. Orwell is a good
example of someone for whom the political and the personal are one and
the same thing, and I love him for that - for his integrity and his
high expectations of the world, and his honesty about it when the world
is disappointing.
(I’ve combined the two questions)…
Q: Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus and others in the literary world
have recently had some back and forth (mostly in Harper’s) about the
current state of literary fiction in America. For his part, Franzen
has expressed concern over the death of the “social novel,” which we
might think of as the kind of book that might spark a national debate
over some topical question like the state of, I don’t know, the
American family. Let’s start with Franzen’s argument. Do you agree that
the social novel is defunct, or that somehow publishing forces (mass
market booksellers, consolidation) have somehow made it harder for
fiction writers to publish and get read in a socially resonant way?
(Feel free to disagree with my characterization of Franzen’s argument)
From Marcus’ perspective, it’s experimental fiction that’s out-of-vogue
or under attack in literary circles. I suppose your work can be
characterized as experimental, although it’s also highly narrative and
accessible (although one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other). Where
would you place yourself on this continuum? And does this debate
energize you in any way? Are you on one side or the other?
A: I have a feeling that to some extent this old experimental vs not
thing (which goes back at least as far as Gardner vs Gass and I expect
even back to Pushkin vs Gogol and beyond) is a version of that old SNL
sketch, where this TV announcer says to two fighting people: “Hold it,
hold it, you two! You’re both right! It’s a dessert topping AND a
floor wax!” By which I mean, I think that both Franzen and Marcus are
on to something. Literary fiction does seem somehow not as widely read
as it should be (not as influential) AND work that is edgy or difficult
does seem marginalized. (I find Franzen very experimental and find
Marcus’s work to be emotionally moving/satisfying).
What I’d say is that personally I’ve been frustrated to some extent by
my inability to draw a bigger audience and I’ve been doing a lot of
soul-searching about why this is. Is it because I’m so smart? That
would be nice. But somehow I doubt it. Then I wonder is it because I
am doing fancy-pants Elitist art moves, too insecure to be a real
populist? Am I being punished for being a product and landlord of the
MFA Ghetto? Possibly. Or is because the Masses are drones? Well, I
think of Dickens: he did okay. But then I think of “Swapping
Proctologists” and think, well, hmm, maybe they are Drones. My secret
fear is that I am somehow writing in a way that both 1) pre-guarantees
a small audience and 2) stems from some flaw in my personality, ie, I
am not big-hearted enough to write something that ‘most’ (more?) people
could read and enjoy and be moved by.
My resolution is to try and make my writing as big as I can while, at
the same time, recognizing that many of the best effects available in
fiction are highwire effects that the majority of readers might not be
ready for. Also trying to remember that the way fiction might
influence a culture is complicated. How so? Well, unlike, say a
movie or a television show, a book is being read by a self-selected
group of people, who are highly trained in processing that particular
medium. And I would say, from what I’ve seen at readings etc, that
this group is also disproportionately influential - more energetic,
kind, motivated, wealthier, etc. So, if one of them reads a book,
that book gets internalized and goes forth in this highly concentrated
form, so to speak. I find that encouraging.
Also I remind myself that the art that is read or watched by gazillions
often is shilling for the status quo - in tone, in content, in its de
facto assumptions.
And finally - I once heard Tobias Wolff say that ALL good writing is
experimental. Nobody sets out to write something that’s been done
before. So maybe the trick lies in recognizing that some supposedly
experimental writing is deeply conservative and some ostensibly realist
work is actually radical. And trying our best not to subscribe to this
paradigm too rigidly, since, in that case, the best we could do is
Completely Be One or the Other. And who wants to do that?
PS Post the interview anywhere you want, even a phone pole or two.
Maybe that will get me the big audience I crave (see above).
Q: It seems to me that your work is very accessible, in that it is
written in a vernacular that’s easy to understand — no Latin phrases,
for example, or references to obscure philosophical movements or Ezra
Pound — in fact, much of your voicing is intensely contemporary, with
colloquialisms, corporate-speak and some fun managerial gobbledygook.
Also your situations would be pretty identifiable and resonant (though
I’m going to test out this theory later in the semester by having some
of my Midwestern students read your work). And I dare to say that your
work is also big-hearted, in the sense that it’s funny and engaging and
loving towards its down-trodden protagonists.
I don’t posit all this simply as flattery, but because I hope we could
maybe delve deeper into this question. If I’m right, and that it’s not
some flaw in your approach, is there any way we see the lack of mass
popularity of your work as a symptom of something societal? Is “serious
fiction” for lack of a better term, somehow antithetical to the
American way of media consumption… even of books? Does it lack easy
answers or sensationalist or sentimental plot lines? Are mass-market
readers conditioned somehow to want material that doesn’t make them
question their world all that much? Gosh, this is a long question….
Okay, here’s a simpler way to ask: What WOULD it mean to be “a real
populist?” Would you have to be Stephen King or James Frey? (or: Is
there an equivalent of Steinbeck and Arthur Miller writing today? Could
there be?)
A: Well, I agonized over this one awhile and then it occurred to me
that one obvious answer is: I’m writing short stories. This is a
difficult medium, for readers and writers, kind of an acquired taste.
The pleasures have more to do with a knowledge of the form and then a
satisfaction at how the limits of the form are being transcended.
Aside from that, I have the feeling that there’s something about the
darkness in my writing that puts some people off. To me, it’s not
really all that dark - but there is a turn in my stories toward, let’s
say, the “there but for the grace of God I” moment that I think makes
some readers uncomfortable - they find me negative, or mopy, or too
inclined to dig through the pile of gold to find the little pile of
crap, say. Why is he so worried? Why not concentrate on some happy
things? And I sometimes find myself agreeing with them. I aspire to
be able to look at any moment and write about it. But fiction skews
toward the catastrophic and, as somebody once said, “Happiness writes
white.” Nobody cares about the day Little Red Riding Hood stayed on
the path and got back home safely. So what I content myself with doing
is try to induce glee within this ‘dark’ context, showing that yes,
misery, cruelty, hatred are real, but that there are counterweights -
humor, artistry, etc - that compensate these things. Something like
that.
But you know, it is a really interesting question: Is it true that
something has happened in American culture that precludes a Steinbeck
1) existing and 2) being read? I really don’t know about that. I
think for now I’m just going to contemplate that one a little bit. It
seems to me that “The Corrections” did what a Steinbeck book used to be
able to do: garner much-deserved critical praise AND a mass audience.
In film it doesn’t seem like as much of a problem - I think of, say,
Wes Anderson. But part of me thinks there’s been a kind of upward
ghettoification of artistic culture which has somehow made it more
snide and more content to preach to the converted, while at the same
time there’s been a kind of dumbing-down in American culture in
general.a kind of reactionary swerve away from anything perceived to be
“critical” or “negative” or “super-serious.” So that means a big gap
between writers and mainstream readers. I don’t know. Were Americans
reading Steinbeck before Oprah suggested it? Are they reading Chehkov
or Dickens? I really don’t know. When I generalize I start sounding
like USA Today (”We’re Generally Eating Slightly Larger Fish, While
Listening to Statistically More Violin-Engorged Songs! And Loving It!”)
By the way, thanks for all the nice things you said above. I
appreciate it.
Q: Hey, sure. I do hate asking these over-generalized questions that are utterly
impossible to answer (if Dostoyevsky were American and living in Tampa,
what would he be writing about?) Anyway, I appreciate your approach to
the question and I like tossing it around.
You mentioned this sense that your writing takes something lightly
comic and then flips it so that it’s dark. This reminds me of Lenny
Bruce jokes or maybe that moment when Buster Keaton is sinking in his
wooden dinghy and it’s funny and it’s funny until you realize he really
is sinking and then it’s all pathos. I think I heard an NPR reporter
asking you about this quality of your work. I’m curious, where do you
think this approach came from? Is it just a way you’re naturally
inclined to understand the world?
I think, yes, it’s my natural inclination for sure. Mamet talks about
how fictional imagination is related to daydreaming. I think what he
means is that the spontaneous, unforced quality of daydreaming is what
we’re shooting for when writing. He uses the example, if I’m
remembering correctly, of that moment when we imagine making our
deathbed speech, or getting a chance to talk with an old lover and
explain ourselves. The pathos in my writing feels like this - hardwired
in somehow. My ‘progress’ as a writer, such as it was, had to do with
letting this out naturally. If I try to imagine someone being heroic,
it feels… difficult. But to imagine someone being humiliated and
struggling against that, then getting insulted, then falling into a
hole… and loving him while this is happening, but still making it
happen… yes, that I can do. Why? God only knows. Probably it’s deep
and sick.
Q: On another idea: I heard you talking to the same NPR interviewer
about your style or diction, and how you realized at some point along
the line that you weren’t going to be writing Faulkner-style prose and
that you had to write in a voice that felt more comfortable to your
middle-class upbringing (it’s quite possible I’m remembering this
incorrectly). Can you talk a little about whether you think there’s a
kind of class element to prose style?
A: I don’t know if it’s class as much as accessing certain inner
voices coming to realize that any voice you can “do” is a valid one.
Or maybe that there are certain voices that we have easy access to, and
so our form of being articulate must have something to do with using
those. I suspect that the Faulkneresque tone came pretty naturally to
him, and when he finally started writing that way it felt like coming
home. In my case, the voice was simpler and more vernacular than what
I, at that time, considered ‘literary.’ It was also often flat-out
inarticulate. And I thought: Well, sure, I know a lot of people, in my
corporate life, or back at the slaughterhouse, who were inarticulate
but 1) passionate and 2) were inarticulate in ways the were not
meaningless (that is, the pattern of their inarticulateness came out of
a psychological/cultural place that was interesting and important).
But the bottom line for me was the realization when I hit 30 or so,
that books had a lot of sentences in them, and so it might be best to
write in a style that came naturally, because I didn’t like the idea of
faking it for so many sentences.
By the way, if Doestoyevsky was an American living in Tampa, he’d be
writing about Tolstoy, who would be an Armenian in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Trust me, I really know my Russian lit.
Q: I noticed earlier that I didn’t quite pick up on a very interesting
point you made about how you pick up and process what’s happening with
America, and how we respond to it. It seems like with 9/11, in
particular, there was some kind of sense that we had to have a
respectful distance — or at least some “processing time” — before we
can respond as creative people to what’s going on in our world. In a
sense, you’re saying that your book is a fairly immediate response to a
certain feeling of instability or frustration with American
culture/politics but that it somehow was able to come out during your
experience of going through it. I like that. I can think of some other
writers who tend to respond in an almost topical way — maybe Tony
Kushner or Grace Paley at one time. Can literary writing “take the
temperature” of the cultural or political climate in a country at a
particular time? Or do we need to sort of wait, and understand our
socio-political culture only in retrospect?
A: I think it can respond pretty quickly. But ‘quickly’ defined
pretty broadly. I guess my feeling is, when something like 9/11
happens, it really just triggers or exaggerates existing American
trends and defects. So a writer would want to write something that
would both outlast the current political moment and harken back from
it, to other American (or just human) crises. So in some ways “The
Lottery” is a pretty good post-9/11 story. And I hope that some of the
stories in this new book will still have currency in 50 yrs, which I
think they will if people in power are still lying in slick ways to
those of us who aren’t.
When we responded to 9/11 by getting ultra-patriotic and insisting we
had “to do something,” that was nothing new with us. That was one very
pronounced vision of America, one you can see, for example, in the
lynch mob scene in Huck Finn. The tragic thing was that, in doing so,
we rejected another tradition of ours, that of waiting until the last
possible minute to get into wars, or maybe of being properly mindful of
the complexity of the world (which is also in that lynch mob scene, in
the guy who gets the mob to back down.) We made a choice of two
American paradigms and personally I think it was the wrong one.
But I think an artist can kind of be like a canary in the coal mine,
sensing something that isn’t fully developed or articulable (if that’s
a word) yet. And then the reader responds to this in the same kind if
intuitive way: something feels familiar and in an odd way
consoling…there’s something good and empowering about seeing ones’
own doubts and fears and queasinesses appear on the page. And though
it’s not reducible, the experience is still heartening, I think.
Also — way earlier you asked about my politics. I am pretty far left
but trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of
both political stripes. I think our country is better than our
government would make people believe. I think the role of art is to
continually complicate our views and move them along the continuum from
conceptual knowledge toward specificity. Our current problems, seem to
me, have all to do with people in power who believe in their own ideas
too much, ideas that were too much formed in the lab and not enough on
the street. So we took those naive, bookish, messianic ideas and
mistook them for truth, and now are reaping the harvest. I don’t like
the demonizing of Bush et al — it’s too easy and won’t help us not
repeat all of this. The only thing that will help is going deep (in
kindness and true curiosity) and trying to really understand how the
world looks to them — people like Rumsfeld etc wake up in the morning
feeling very energized at the good they’re going to do during the day.
So this is where art comes in: It’s the one way we can become Other
long enough to understand that Other doesn’t really exist — we have it
all inside us, and can therefore understand, and can therefore
transform.
Whew! It must be late and I must be tired.
Q: Wow… well, I must say, this is spectacular. Oh, and if you could send me a brief list of bio info, that would make it all very straight-forward for those who don’t know your history before you were a fiction writer.
I can’t tell you what an honor and a privilege it has been to be able to
have this discussion with you via email.
Thanks again, truly, for a wonderful correspondence.
all best,
Nina
A: Sure:
BIO INFO:
It went like this, more or less:
Graduated from Mines
Worked in Sumatra
Came home sick
Lived in Amarillo TX, LA, and Chicago, while working a bunch of
different jobs - slaughterhouse first, then doorman, then roofer.
Got into Syracuse MA program, studied with Toby Wolff. (this is like
1986-1987)
While in program, got married.
Had our first daughter in 1987, moved to Albany, worked as tech writer
for pharmaceutical company.
Moved to Rochester in about 1989, worked from then until 1996 as tech
writer/engineer for environmental company. Wrote CivilWarLand during
that period, it came out in 1996.
Started as a temporary hire at Syracuse in 1997, hired the following
year, been here since. I’m officially as Associate Professor in the
English Department, and I teach in the Creative Writing Program.
—————————–
George Saunders Profile
by Nina Siegal
American fiction has become a largely apolitical affair in recent
years, with even the savviest social novelists, such as Jonathan
Franzen, shrinking from sweeping cultural critiques. A notable
exception is George Saunders, the contemporary master of the darkly
comic short story, and the closest thing our literary moment has to
Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut.
He’s one of the only effective social satirists writing fiction
today,” says Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker
magazine, which has published at least one or two Saunders stories a
year since the mid-1990s.
The author of two acclaimed short story collections, Pastoralia and
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Saunders has also written a novella, The
Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and a children’s book, The Very
Persistent Grappers of Frip. In June, Riverhead will release his third
collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation, which Publisher’s
Weekly calls “his best work yet.”
A Saunders story typically operates by some gross exaggeration of
contemporary life, set in a not-too-distant future where things have
gone irrevocably haywire. His admixture of comedy and pathos, absurdity
and realism, and his playful touch make it so you barely feel the
political sting. But it’s there.
Saunders doesn’t love the term “political” to describe his work. Any
attempt to advocate a particular political stance would be “death for
storytelling, because it implies a kind of incuriosity” he tells me,
and because “fiction should always be . . . complicating our habitual
view of things.”
By the same token, he believes in “ethical” fiction. “The main thing
that fiction does is rev up the quality of our awareness, make us more
involved in the world, more enamored of it,” he says. “And this feels
political, maybe, especially in a culture like ours, where so much of
what we do is infused with dullness and materialist sloth. Fiction is a
way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves, which is a very
radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that voice and
forcing it into acquiescence.”
As far as his own politics, Saunders says, “I’m pretty far left but
trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of both
political stripes.”
Born in 1958 and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Saunders says he
was inspired to write by reading Hemingway — and by a high school
teacher he had a crush on. But he didn’t take the usual route. In 1981,
he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School
of Mines and went to work on an oil exploration crew in Sumatra.
“Somehow it never occurred to me to study English,” he says. “I was
very much under the sway of Ayn Rand at the time and didn’t want to be
a sniveling Thinker, but an exotically named Doer of Great Deeds. Like
a pirate or, in my case, an engineer.”
For a while after graduation, he had a series of odd jobs, working as a
knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse in Texas, a doorman in Beverly
Hills, and then a roofer in Chicago. In the mid-1980s he decided to go
back to school, this time to study writing at Syracuse University in
upstate New York, where he worked with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger.
He got married during the program and had his first daughter in 1987.
After receiving his MFA, he moved to Albany to work as a technical
writer for a pharmaceutical company. From 1989 to 1996, he was in
Rochester, New York, working as a technical writer and environmental
engineer, while completing his first book, Civilwarland, by sneaking it
in at work, he says.
During this time, he submitted several short stories to The New
Yorker, and David McCormick, the then-assistant fiction editor,
responded with a positive letter to one of them, “Downtrodden Mary’s
Failed Campaign of Terror.” McCormick and the then-senior fiction
editor, Dan Menaker, asked him to send more work, and Saunders
submitted a couple more stories that were also rejected. When Tina
Brown took over the magazine, he tried again, submitting “Offloading
Mrs. Schwartz,” a story from the Civilwarland collection. That was the
winner.
“I waited for about a month, I guess,” he says. “Then I was out
working at Fort Drum in Watertown, doing a groundwater investigation
for the Corps of Engineers with another guy from our company, and got a
message at, of all places, the MicroTel, saying they’d accepted the
piece. Needless to say, a big night ensued.”
Civilwarland was published in 1996, the same year Syracuse University hired him as a temporary creative writing teacher. He’s been there ever since, and is
now an associate professor in the English Department, teaching in the
Creative Writing Program.
Given the current trend in contemporary American literature toward
naturalism, it’s a wonderful surprise to come across a prominent
fiction writer who is willing to toy with reality and who is unafraid
to take on such taboo subjects as American consumerism, corporate
greed, and abuses of power.
“We’re in a political situation that’s just overflowing with ripeness
for satire, but satire is just not coming out in fiction as much,” says
Treisman, who is also Saunders’s editor at The New Yorker. “You see it
in a lot of political cartoons, short films, graphic novels, but it’s
hard to make it meaningful and appealing to readers in fiction, without
having them feel that they’re having their heads beaten on with a
hammer. That’s George’s gift. I never feel as if I’m being beaten over
the head.”
The same is not true for Saunders’s characters. They are often being
beaten over the head, berated into submission, absurdly dehumanized by
senseless and mean corporate-style overlords, most of them barely
literate.
Take, for example, the main character of “Pastoralia,” perhaps
Saunders’s most famous story, from the 2001 book of the same name, in
which the narrator and a woman named Janet perform the roles of
prehistoric man and mate in a financially failing Human History theme
park. They are required to fax their bosses Daily Partner Performance
Evaluations, and then live together in harmony. The faceless owners of
the theme park send the performers notes — and less and less goat to
eat every day. Meanwhile, Janet’s real family is falling apart, largely
due to the fact that she can’t sustain her son on her paltry salary.
In his novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Saunders
takes us to Inner Horner, a country so small that only one person can
fit inside at a time, and the six other countrymen must wait their turn
in a “Short Term Residency Zone.” When the country suddenly shrinks and
can only accommodate three-quarters of a person, the Inner Hornerites
become refugees to Outer Horner, a much larger country, which is now
under the thrall of a new despot named Phil.
A “slightly bitter nobody,” until his brain slips out of his head,
Phil makes a rousing speech to his countrymen, saying that the Inner
Hornerites are weaklings and parasites. He instructs his fellow Outer
Hornerites to tax their neighbors for overstepping their bounds.
“Tax time, slackers,” said Phil. “Stop that stupid stretching and
listen up. You’re late with your dang taxes.”
“But we don’t have any money,” said Elmer. “You know we don’t. You
took it all yesterday.”
‘Oh, you people,” said Phil. “What did you have in mind? Living in our
beloved country for free forever? Do you know what we do? In our
country? We work. We believe that time is money. Therefore, as time
passes, in our land, we diligently work, which produces, guess what?
Wealth. Money.”
In an essay Saunders wrote to accompany the novella, he explained, “I
had in mind, at various times, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Holocaust . . .
Islamic fundamentalism, the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, red
states vs. blue states, Abu Ghraib, Shia vs. Sunni,” he explained, “as
well as smaller, more localized examples of Us vs. Them.”
He’s often been likened to George Orwell, a comparison he finds
embarrassing. He even conjures up an image of Orwell “standing
victoriously with his foot on my chest, twitching that little mustache
of his.”
Saunders says he draws a picture of the world that is “inconsistently
distorted, more fun-house mirror than shrinking ray . . . like a scale
model, but melted.”
So influential has he been on the current generation of writers that
Treisman says she receives at least a few fiction manuscripts each week
from Saunders imitators.
“Ultimately, George’s stories are 99.9 percent ridiculous and .1
percent heartbreaking, but that .1 percent is the most important part,
the crucial part, it’s that one fragment of reality breaking into without
which you’d otherwise you miss everything,” Treisman says. “It’s very hard to
do.”
His new book, In Persuasion Nation, explores familiar Saunders
territory, but it also has a touch of realism that seems almost, at
moments, terrifying. One story from the collection, “The Red Bow,”
about a town consumed by a pet-killing hysteria, won him the 2004
National Magazine Award for fiction, and “Bohemians,” about a young boy
trying to make sense of two Eastern European widows who lives on his
block, was included in The Best American Short Stories 2005.
He wrote many of the stories “out of a kind of ragged anger/sadness
about what’s going on in our country,” he says. “Lately, I think we
don’t really know what we stand for anymore. After 9/11 we were: the
scared country that wasn’t going to get burned again. Then we became:
Those guys who believe in Freedom above all else, but won’t be bothered
to define the term.”
But he doesn’t pin everything on Bush.
“I don’t like the demonizing of Bush, et al,” he says. “It’s too easy
and won’t help us not repeat all of this.”
Saunders says he’s curious about them, though. ”People like Rumsfeld,
etc., wake up in the morning feeling very energized at the good they’re
trying to do during the day,” he says. “This is where art comes in: trying to understand those you might initially ignore, or reduce, or despise.”
Exploring this paradox, he says, can be part of “a meditation on our
plight here on earth.’”
“Our current problems, seem to me, have all to do with people in power
who believe in their own ideas too much, ideas that were too much
formed in the lab and not enough on the street,” he says. “So we took
those naive, bookish, messianic ideas and mistook them for truth, and
now are reaping the harvest.”
Nina Siegal is a freelance journalist who has been contributing to The
Progressive since 1997. In May, she received her MFA in fiction from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.
