A moral urgency hums in these tales
The word games of George Saunders aren't for everybody, and there's some slippage, but fans will applaud
From the Toronto Star, June 4, 2006

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders, Riverhead Books, 228 pages, $31.50

"My model for reading and writing is if I'm the writer and you're the reader, ideally we're in a motorcycle with a really tight sidecar," explained George Saunders in an interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican last April. "I revise the prose so many times in a kind of visceral way that you and I are basically in the same motorcycle, and when I go around a corner, you're right with me there."

It's a great metaphor, except Saunders prefers hairpins and corkscrews over simple, comfortable curves, never hesitating to strew corpses or starving Filipino children along the motorcycle route. This collection of short fiction, his third, is filled with more intricate, literary latticeworks.

These Faberge eggs soaked in petrol detonate with anger ("It is a bitter fight, which we know because out of a big cloud of dust fly a number of limbs, a bottle cap, bits of delicious flaky chocolate, and part of an orange peel"); regret ("There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing"); and bitter humour ("Blockbuster has a new program of identifying all videos as either Artsy or Regular.") Despite his strange journeys and shortcuts, he doesn't lack for passengers, with his work appearing frequently in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and McSweeney's.

Saunders has an ability to condense everything that is wrong with a particular iteration of popular culture into a note-perfect, ridiculous TV premise: "On Final Twist, five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead." Meanwhile, in "My Flamboyant Grandson," Saunders conjures a future imperfect New York as a phantasmagoria of advertising, where citizens insufficiently attentive to Cybec Emergent Screens are forced to watch a moral hygiene film called Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate!

But for all the ha-ha inventiveness, it is in the quiet moments that Saunders shines: "She looked so pretty, like someone has put a light inside her and switched it on." Or: "Down in the quarry were the sad Cats, the slumping watchman's shack, the piles of reddish discarded dynamite wrappings that occasionally rose erratically up the hillside like startled birds."

Equally important, not every tale has the kook dial cranked to 11. For each story like "Brad Carrigan, American" (a grotesque version of The Truman Show where the ridiculous becomes sublime -- and vice-versa), there is "Bohemians," a straightforward tale of a prepubescent boy who crosses paths with an elderly neighbour. Likewise, the story "93990" -- about an experiment with lab monkeys -- initially reads like science homework, but its methodical, clinical tone slowly evaporates, leaving behind a sting of melancholy.

Is this collection as good as his previous CivilWarLand in Bad Decline or Pastoralia? That depends how long you've spent in the Saunders sidecar. New passengers might find his habit of using descriptors (man-briefly-involved-with-a-Ding-Dong, oblong green triangular symbol, the polar bear with the axe in its head) instead of proper character names tiresome. And his self-help parody is an acquired taste: "In the van I do a Bad Feelings Acknowledgement re the reburial. I visualize my Useless Guilt as a pack of black dogs. I open the gate, throw out the Acknowledgement Meat."

Despite being an unreconstituted Saunders superfan, I felt In Persuasion Nation contains, for the first time, some unsuccessful experiments. While his stories are never entirely predictable, some of these feel practiced. Not that Saunder's repetition is boring, but his weirdo consistency can make you take his gift for granted. Put another way, the first Saunders story with a zombie can coast on novelty, but the fourth zombie story has to do something more than turn the sidecar sharply.

A few years ago, in the literary journal The Believer, Saunders observed: "All good fiction is moral, in that it is imbued with the world, and powered by our real concerns: love, death, how-should-I-live." What sets this collection apart is the moral urgency humming beneath Saunders's best stories, an ability to isolate "real concerns" combined with the confidence required to push the reader into territory both vital and unexplored.