Boxed In | The Nation

If you are a new reader of George Saunders, the first thing you ought to know is that Saunders is the funniest writer in America, more likely to make you laugh in public, if that's where you're reading his books, than any writer since P.G. Wodehouse. The competition--David Sedaris, Tom Wolfe, Christopher Buckley--isn't even close.

It is easy, therefore, to pigeonhole Saunders, to think of him largely as a wit and an absurdist extraordinaire. This would be to miss his point. Saunders's laughs are a cover, a diversion, beneath which reside some profoundly serious intentions regarding the morality of how we live and the power of love and immanent death to transform us into vastly better creatures than we could otherwise hope to be. These are the biggest intentions an artist can have.

Among younger writers these days, Saunders has many imitators. He often writes with great wit and affection about working-class people and the situations of nonsensical hardship they face. With so few writers left in the United States qualified (and willing) to cover this terrain, Saunders ends up attracting some disciples simply along class lines. But class is not his main concern. His main concerns are much harder to pin down--unlike writers who often can be successfully imitated, say Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver, Saunders does not work in the mainstream tradition of North American short fiction, nor does he have a simple style, though it may sometimes appear so. His sensibility, always a close relative of style, is exclusively his own, sophisticated, daring and politically unusual, to the degree that one can't really imitate him unless one believes what he believes--everything he does is in service of an immovably unique worldview. In this as in several other ways, Saunders reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, which is to say he is a radical, and only a small number of people who really understand the convictions behind his work--the caustic humor that, pulled back, reveals a scouring contempt for consumer society and modern life, as well as a deep and specifically religious eagerness for transcendent meaning--would choose to embrace them.

Saunders's previous works include the short novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and the story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. In Persuasion Nation, his new book of stories, is no mere compilation of pieces. Nor is the book a grouping of "related" stories. It's more like a stack of armaments. He has divided the collection into four parts, each section numbered and headed by a long fictional "excerpt" from a text of Saunders's invention called Taskbook for the New Nation, by one Bernard "Ed" Alton (the quoted "Ed" is a typical Saunders gesture, a couple of ink strokes revealing what is often ridiculous in our cultural habits and chosen identities). It's a brilliant piece of faux right-wing philosophy, full of blowsy declarations about our imagined "enemies" and how to combat them, which entails, in the fictional pundit's view, complete moral flexibility, bending our principles to whatever form may be necessary for our continued prosperity and strength; indeed, the whole book is a symphony on the destruction of individuality and honor that follows our tendency to do just as old "Ed" recommends. The strongest stories in the book start in Saunders's realm of surreal comedy but end in nuanced revelations of the terror and longing that lie beneath the surface of contemporary American life, a terror and longing that Saunders strongly associates with the consumer mega-culture that has become our only national milieu.

Fortunately, Saunders need not make this point didactically: His extraordinary imagination finds stability and credibility in his talents as a mimic of all the tonalities of contemporary American public language. He does working-class sad-sack narrators and stories in the form of documents (such as "93990," which takes the form of a lab report on the effects of toxins used on monkeys for the benefit of science)--and by the end of the book one has the sense that there is no dialect that Saunders can't reproduce on the page. In "Jon" he displays a perfect mastery of an idiom you might call talk-radio-white--grammatically confused and fueled entirely by received phrase-packages and muddy ideas:

Back in the time of which I am speaking, due to our Coordinators had mandated us, we had all seen that educational video of It's Yours to Do With What You Like! in which teens like ourselfs speak on the healthy benefits of getting off by oneself and doing what one feels like in terms of self-touching, which what we learned from that video was, there is nothing wrong with self-touching, because love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be, so go off alone, see what is up, with you and your relation to your own gonads, and the main thing is, just have fun, feeling no shame!

In Persuasion Nation moves steadily forward with a growing sense of authorial anger and oddly tenacious religiosity, in a series of morally outraged fables gorgeously clothed in idiom and humor. "Brad Carrigan, American," like the title piece, first ran in Harper's, rather than The New Yorker, which usually publishes Saunders--one senses that Saunders has ventured into territory The New Yorker is not quite ready to handle. Both stories address an extraordinary fictional terrain: characters alive and struggling not in what would qualify as even the most fantastically imagined earthly locale, past or future, but within television programming. Not actors in a television show or commercial, mind you, but actual characters who live inside the realm of the super-reality we watch on TV.