BOOK - Funny Things and Not-So-Funny Things: "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" and "The Sea"

If you’ve never read George Saunders before, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a delightful political satire, filled with Big Ideas and Bigger Jokes. If you have read George Saunders, this is more of the same, and you won’t be surprised to find that the Jokes™, while Bigger, aren’t any more substantiated, and the more familiar you become with this one-dimensional pony, the less you’ll be laughing. (A quick note on Capitalization: Saunders likes this postmodern emphasis, one of the many things he overuses in his efforts to re-brand the ordinary as the Not-So-Ordinary.) No, the comic “car,” so to speak, is low on wit and heavy on circuitous dialogue. It’s fine for a while, but once the book starts to lap itself—impressive, since it’s barely a novella at 120 small pages, not counting illustrations—the repetition is more than a little painful. Ha-ha-ow.

In the case of Phil, it’s a shame the storytelling is impotent, because the story itself is pretty good: a trenchant parallel of modern imperialism, a.k.a. protectionism, a.k.a. Kill-Them-Before-They-Kill-Us-ism. Set on a weird planet, akin in size perhaps to The Little Prince’s abode, there are the residents of Inner Horner—a country so small that only one resident can actually fit at a time, the rest having to reside in a Short-Term Occupancy Zone—and the citizens of Outer Horner, a place so large that huge tracts o’ land are completely undeveloped (although prone, in typical Saundersian exuberance, to have disembodied argumentative cow heads poking up through the soil). The Inner inhabitants are intelligent and thoughtful and spend all day solving mathematical proofs. The Outer Hornerites (like the titular Phil) are ignorant freeloaders, who do nothing but preen and swoon over their own supposed self-importance.

If you can’t see the parallels yet, consider the main gist of the plot. Inner Horner suddenly shrinks, causing the accidental invasion of Outer Horner, and Phil—whose brain keeps sliding out of his rack, causing him to speak in a stentorian voice—comes up with a Final Solution (yes, that one). He puts the residents in a ghetto (“Peace-Encouraging Enclosure”) and proceeds to disassemble them all, right before God, the greatest deus ex machina of them all, shows up to set things right.

If Saunders were able to steer this narrative, it would all be rich and satisfying: Political Satire Gone Wild. Instead, these bitterly funny passages are followed by much much much much much more of the same, which tends to make the humor masochistic.

No, if you want to get away with repetition and doubletalk, you need a first-person narrator, preferable someone reflective and somewhat progressed in years. Someone like that, distanced from the world, a ghost of himself—they, and only they, have a natural way of flickering back and forth from first loves and bright happy summer days to last loves, now dead of cancer, and the permanent autumnal shroud left behind. The Sea, for which John Banville just won the Man Booker, is such a book, which, in conjunction with Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning Gilead, shows that awards tend to go to deeply meditative novels. Banville is more focused than Robinson, though, and his meandering never seems aimless; his lengthily descriptive, difficult passages are what one might simply call painfully beautiful.

Is every passage necessary? No, probably not. There’s too much description, but it’s hard to criticize it when it sounds like this: “The autumn sun felt slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.” Yes, it’s a bit prolix, but doesn’t his keen sense for beauty justify the need to slug through these verbal trenches with dictionary in hand? And the wordy façade is really just an emphasis for the worlds own deceptive clarity and all the language just an attempt to reflexively dig beneath the visual, to uncover the truth.

“That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold past and colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet."

What is the world, ultimately, but memory and vision? What is literature, really, but a criticism of life? (Or so says Matthew Arnold.) Walking through The Sea is like letting paint lick at your feet, each recession of the tide leaving a different picture, each new wave another image, another palette of color. Of course, the downside to walking through water for so long—even such picturesque waves—is that the skin dries up, prunes. So too, the brain. The Sea is an immensely difficult book, one that requires strict attention and frequent rereading, and breaks, lots and lots of breaks. So take a mental towel with you, spread out and relax on the beach: this book, especially the beautiful tragic ending, is a masterpiece.