Boxed In (Page 2)

"In Persuasion Nation" depicts a series of characters in television commercials, most memorably a polar bear who must, over and over, as often as an ad commonly runs on television, enact a scene in which he attempts to steal some Cheetos from an igloo, and an Eskimo (who like the polar bear is a reluctant actor, trapped in this repetitive narrative) catches him and axes him in the head. In the other story, Brad Carrigan is a confused husband to Doris in some kind of sitcom replete with a wacky neighbor and various family relations. Plot changes and transformations of the physical landscape keep occurring, we gather, as the network determines new ways to keep the show popular. At one inspired moment, the backyard becomes a mass of writhing, talking corpses from some Central Asian ethnic slaughter. Brad worries about the corpses, trying to calm his increasingly troubled conscience, but everyone else just wants to get along in the dumb-happy realm they've been given: There is no grief in a laugh-tracked world.

And they're not only on TV; they watch TV, too: At one point the extended family dines and takes in a report on babies in Africa born with AIDS. Needless to say, they quickly change the channel, settling instead on a channel advertising a new program called Kill the Ho. Each section of the story ends with a "We see" narrative device that introduces a commercial break--for example, "We see from the concerned look on Brad's face, and the way he throws back his chair, and the concerned look Doris shoots him for throwing back his chair in the middle of dinner, that it's time for a commercial"--which is Saunders's way of reminding us that, fictionally speaking, we're watching a television program while at the same time we're inside the consciousness of a fictional character who happens to be a character in that program.

One feels strongly that Saunders is doing something entirely new here. With these two stories and a band of others in this book, he has achieved a kind of twenty-first-century American magical realism. And magical realism, as Joan Didion once observed, and Gabriel García Márquez confirmed in his Nobel lecture, had a realistic purpose, reality itself in Latin America in those years having become "magical" all on its own. Any serious depiction of actual life essentially required this treatment. So it has become for us, and Saunders is the only prominent writer who has fully recognized the fact. Many of his stories reveal a truth that we prefer to spend most of our time hiding from: that in the United States today, for a person with an active conscience, full participation in daily economic and social life has become increasingly a schizophrenic and impossible act.

Saunders's way out of this dilemma, and the counterpoint to his ingenious comedy, resides in a growing spiritual dimension in his work, a spirituality that reaches its peak in the collection's final piece, "CommComm." CommComm, an office on an Air Force base, stands for "community communications." The narrator's specialty is PIDS, an acronym for a public information instrument, something like a press release but involving more media--PowerPoint, themed coloring books, etc. The pace of misdeeds at the base, however, soon makes such PR Band-Aid work pointless. Meanwhile, on the personal front, the narrator has other problems, largely embodied in the ghosts of his mother and father, who inhabit his house and spend their nights in extreme agitation, flitting from the couch to the top of the stairs, spinning around the floor lamp and bouncing around the kitchen in a state of increasing distress. It turns out they were brutally murdered by two otherwise unexplained Latvians who showed up in this Air Force base town somewhere in Middle America. Mom and Dad don't know they are dead and are trapped in harrowing nights of reliving their violent demise. During the day they hide in the decorative turret at the top of their small-town home. The narrator tells us:

I climbed up once, then never again: jaws hanging open, blank stares, the two of them sitting against the wall, insulation in their hair, holding hands.
 "Have a good one," I shout at the turret as I leave for work.
 Which I know is dumb, but still.

Of all the remarkable moments in this book, none quite matches the end of this story, in which the narrator is murdered along with Giff, another Air Force base employee (they're killed by a colleague trying to keep his job). They too become ghosts, and in some complicated mathematics of Saunders's ghostdom, Giff manages to "free" the narrator's parents and the narrator himself, so that they can stop haunting the world and go where they belong. Saunders depicts them making their passages to the realm of the dead:

We go. Snow passes through us, gulls pass through us. Tens of towns, hundreds of towns stream by below, and we hear their prayers, grievances, their million signals of loss. Secret doubts shoot up like tracers, we sample them as we fly through: a woman with a too-big nose, a man who hasn't closed a sale in months, a kid who's worn the same stained shirt three days straight, two sisters worried about a third who keeps saying she wants to die. All this time we grow in size, in love, the distinction between Giff and me diminishing, and my last thought before we join something I can only describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded is, Giff, Giff, please explain, what made you come back for me?

Again, one thinks of Flannery O'Connor, of her uncompromising sense of comedy and the hard tragedy and undying hope she always revealed beneath it. One of her greatest stories, "Revelation," features a vision reminiscent of Saunders's: a prissy and preposterous farm wife suddenly shown, as she hoses down her concrete pig pen, a stream of bodies rising toward heaven. Nowadays, in a time of the most limited sense of possibility and ambition in American literature, where even the discussion of the requirements of art, as opposed to success, feels obsolete and embarrassing, I can't think of another writer who would try to do what Saunders is doing, or anything close to it. This is an important book.

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