entertain

George Saunders has written America into a pair of books of short stories, Pastoralia, and Civilwarland In Bad Decline, which have gone fairly uncelebrated, which is a shame for several reasons. Firstly, they present in terms fairly easy to interpret, the America that is largely the truth, though through ridiculous exaggeration. And what does that mean?

Okay, here is the George Saunders Flip Book.

1. Man has job as some kind of sad and ramshackle spectacle or exhibition. Man generally has a wife figure. Man is of good intelligence, but lacking in courage. Man is usually entrenched in poverty.

2. Enter Oppressive Boss Man. He oppresses.

3. Man somehow displays pitiful cowardice or incompetence at his demeaning and dehumanizing job site.

4. Wife thereafter runs to the folds of the freakish biceps of the Oppressive Boss Man.

5. Enraged Man protests somehow, engaging in some act of rebellion, usually overthrowing Oppressive Boss Man.

6. In the first availible moment to enjoy his success, Man is crushed by the unbearable weight of society or some other outside force acting in the way of the Boss Man’s Avenger.

So why, again, dear reader, was I talking about America? Why, you ask, was I rambling on about the meaning behind these stories?

Because they resonate enormously. Through details, Saunders manages to recreate some perverse reflection of our society. In "Sea Oak," for example, a male Hooters girl comes home from work to find his jobless sisters watching "How My Child Died Violently," in which some sleazily-named host forces "healing experiences" upon mourning parents. Though you claim to know nothing about daytime TV, this sounds oddly familiar to you. For dinner, it’s "Stars ‘n’ Flags," into which, Saunders remarks, the company inserts some kind of sugar which renders the food product somewhat addictive. Any American who doesn’t occasionally eat this kind of stuff is generally a member of some departed social elite.

It’s in details like this that Saunders creates an Ultrareality, which is to say that he pushes every detail of all that is demeaning in American life to the maximum volume. He emphasizes the strangely dehumanizing modern poverty both of wealth and of spirit through these things, in the most straight-faced way. He drops the reader in these Ultrarealities without blinking an eye, and the reader is at once repulsed and empathetic to these stories. His style is direct, as if spoken with steady eye contact, with little regard for anything except accurate depiction of character and situation.

His other stories include, "Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror," "The Barber’s Unhappiness," "The End of FIRPO in the World," and "Winky."

In each of these stories, he approaches several questions, both of society and human nature. One thing he deals with is the seeming inverse relationship between intelligence, and audaciousness. His protagonists are usually quite intelligent and well aware of their oppression, but choose to merely exist in it, accept it, bow to it. While less intelligent characters around them usually remain in their situations via total ignorance. The sisters in "Sea Oak," mentioned above are unemployed and studying for GEDs at home for no explained reason. After concluding that Winston Churchill was in opera, one sister says to the protagonist, "You’ve done high school, man…We got to get our GEDs so we can watch TV and not be all distracted." They’re not afraid of anything, the sisters, but they haven’t any larger concept of life than what’s there in front of them. Like cows, they graze upon whatever’s there. And the protagonist submits to his job as visual meat, adhering to rules and settling for chump change in return.

All of this really amounts to a point about poverty. In this country, one in five adults lives below the poverty line. There is a cheapness to life in America, and we are in a time when often luxuries are cheaper than necessities; when Cheetos and the like are more accessible than fresh food, there is a problem. But the problem is, the intersection of necessary character components to relieve the problem isn’t happening. Or that’s how Saunders sees it, anyway. Basically, the proper sorts of people haven’t all come together in a situation where the problem and the means to solution are all clear and important to them.

In short, Saunders writes his Ultrareality, perhaps, in the hopes of inspiring people who think like him to get their cranks turning in regards to this particular problem in America: complacency and low expectations, lack of temerity and ignorance are the enemies, and one man alone cannot fight them. Through his wrenchingly unflinching and vivid creations, he does so with excellent effect. Style, plot, depth, meaning, Saunders has it all. And by the end of a book, you get the idea, and you start to care.