Life in the real world
Finding sense in the twisted tales of George Saunders
By Nikki Bazar 05/11/2006
Years ago, George Saunders moved to Los Angeles with his girlfriend in search of fame and fortune. What he got instead was a job as a doorman in Beverly Hills for $4 per hour and a bed in his aunt’s basement. “I didn’t know exactly what I wanted,” Saunders told the Weekly in an interview last Friday, “but I wanted in. I could feel there was a lot of great energy, like fame and money and all that, and I was sort of naïve about how one might get it. I kind of thought you just show up.”
Now Saunders returns to LA under what he admits are “the best possible circumstances.” The Syracuse professor has just published “In Persuasion Nation,” his third collection of stories, and is back to read at Skylight Books as part of a national book tour. His unsuccessful stab at greatness in LA is captured in “Christmas,” an autobiographical account of his stint working for his uncle’s roofing company, which he first published as a memoir in The New Yorker.
Big mistake, says Saunders, after hearing through his uncle that his former fellow roofers were less than pleased with their portrayal. “At 20 years distance, you’re being as truthful as you can, and no doubt you’re still messing something up.” So Saunders changed the names and republished it as a short story instead.
Having, perhaps, learned a valuable lesson, many of the other stories in “In Persuasion Nation” are more standard Saundersesque fare — deliciously bleak, comically skewed tales. In “My Flamboyant Grandson,” citizens are forced to wear “Everly Strips,” which allow them to be targeted by advertising images whenever they are outdoors. In the title story, TV commercial characters abused as part of advertising campaigns stage a resistance effort, and a polar bear from a Cheetos ad discovers God. “Jon” is a story of a young man bred in a market research compound whose lover convinces him to escape to the outside world, where they must relearn how to articulate their own thoughts and emotions.
Readers will be reminded of Saunders’ last story collection, “Pastoralia,” which also portrayed human life as saturated by — even indistinguishable from — advertising, instigating the usual terms bandied around in Saunders’ honor such as Orwellian, dystopian and futurist. But make no mistake about it: The fabric with which Saunders weaves his tales is very much a product of the present and of the real. If anything, these stories are simply hyperbolic presentations of what already exists. Saunders himself sees it as simply “us with a 10 percent exaggeration.
“I’m saying this is us distilled in some comic way. I’m not a big worrier about the future, because I’m sure it’ll be all fucked up but in a totally different way than we can even imagine.”
Interspersed with these satirical comedies are stories that convey a new sense of empathy and compassion in Saunders’ writing. “Bohemians” tells of a young boy who grows to understand his widowed neighbor who survived the war. In the most affecting story of the collection, “CommComm,” a young man whose parents have died comes home each night to the tortured ghosts of his parents, who don’t realize they’re dead. When a murdered co-worker sacrifices his only post-mortem visit to releasing the man’s parents, the man understands for the first time the weight and meaning of compassion.
This sense of compassion, which truly runs throughout the book, echoes Saunders’ Buddhist beliefs, though he says it originates from his Catholic roots. “They did a kind of weird thing with omniscience and guilt, but the thing I took from it was that it was possible for one human being to empathize with another one. That made a hole in my mind for that idea, and then art filled it later, and then Buddhism.”
In Buddhism, says Saunders, compassion is closely related to awareness and a quality of being truly nonjudgmental. This helps not only in life but also with the writing process. “Your job as a writer is to not really be a saint, but just to be open to all the data that’s coming in.”
As a practicing Buddhist, Saunders sometimes focuses his satirical skill on essays about the Iraq War, an event which aggrieves him greatly. “I find it really confusing and really disappointing because I thought we were a different country than that. My thought was that 9/11 was kind of a moment where the national heart just got wide open, and it felt to me like it would have been an amazing moment if we could have said, ‘Suffering sucks, and not just for us, but it must suck for everybody, so why don’t we try to take a new direction in our country which is aggressively against suffering of all kinds?’ Instead I thought we just went the other direction and we got scared and aggressive, and that made me sad.”
Saunders’ deep sadness at the fear and polarization that captured the country in the wake of 9/11 is evident in many of the stories in “In Persuasion Nation,” giving the book a greater depth than his previous work. In “Red Bow,” for instance, an entire town agrees to murder all its pets after a rabid dog kills a young girl. In an instant, the family’s grief is hungrily absorbed, spawning hysteria and rage.
“I didn’t plan it this way,” admits Saunders, “but when I look at it now with a little distance, this book is just like a secret or hidden history of 9/11, or that whole period from ’98 to now.”
He may not have planned it, but somewhere in the bizarre, demented distortions of Saunders’ stories, the world is just beginning to make sense again.
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