BOOK: "In Persuasion Nation"

And the moral of the story is, don't write novellas. But I suppose I should backtrack a little bit first. Our tale begins earlier this year, when George Saunders published his brief and fabulist political satire, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. That book, while intriguing, carried on a joke so long that a metronomic pallor overtook Saunders' normally wicked wit. Thankfully, Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation is a return to his sharp, trenchant form. For good or ill, Saunders is our generation's Jonathan Swift, and while his stories are more aimed at today's constant commercial consumerism rather than war or famine, Saunders has Americana cold.

"I CAN SPEAK!(TM)," the first such story, is a sharp barb at how our culture views babies--not for eating, mind you, but for using, as much a product and consumer as their parents. Written in the form of a letter from a product representative to an unsatisfied client, this short segment delivers a one-two punch when it confesses a blatant truth: America hates caring for babies. So wouldn't it be great, asks the story, wouldn't it be natural to want to put a mask over our children's faces that could make it seem as if they were talking, as if they could do more than "glub glub glub" and suck feces off their thumbs? Would that make us love them more? Blunt and subtle at the same time, most of Saunders' material will have you readers double-taking at the page in mirthful horror; really, what won't he say next?

Certainly he wouldn't dare to address cruelty to animals in drug testing ("93990"). Surely he wouldn't insult the crude yet efficient power of the dumb, dumb commercial ("In Persuasion Nation"). Well, there's no way he'd manage to show how reality TV and our fascination with the obscene has overtaken family values ("Brad Carrigan, American"). No, he wouldn't go there.

Among the many things George Saunders "won't" do, one thing that has eluded his past collections has been a genuine sense of connection with the characters. His work is so fixated on the satire and the story that the characters are usually all the same. While that's still very much the case here--Saunders has a very distinct narrative voice--two of his early stories, "My Flamboyant Grandson" and "Jon" manage to find that emotional drive, too. Set in the very near future (where all of Saunders' stories transpire), these are tales of characters who break through the trappings of culture and the cult of Capitalism to find love and acceptance of others. That may not be very American, I know, but it's nice to see that even a post-modern verbal pugilist has hope for us all.

Back on the writing front, Saunders is a very exciting verbalist. He has short, rapt sentences, and his grammatical inconsistencies are representative not of his own shortcomings, but of America's worsening hold on language. Everything is geared for the ADD-riddled audience, and everything is fast, fast, now. "He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook." That could be a story right there; instead, it's part of a larger piece on the rise of violence as a tool to sell products, and its saddening success.

Here again: "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. Pursuing the Meat, the black dogs disappear over a cliff, turning into crows (i.e., Neutral/Non-Guilty Energy), which then fly away, feeling Assuaged." How inventive, how coy . . . how much you want to bet we see some new-age philosophy similar to this next year? And this line of thinking isn't even what the story "CommComm" is about, it's just a digression that reads like a meal.

The closest parallel I can find to George Saunders is the playwright, Greg Kotis, whose over-the-top antics drill the senselessness of America into even the most obtuse audiences. Saunders, working in a less-active medium, has the opportunity to be subtler, but both find a balance of slapstick and ghoulish urban fantasy. Though a few of George Saunders' stories in In Persuasion Nation seem a bit one-linerish ("93990" and "My Amendment"), they're still great reads, reads which take that one step beyond simple commentary along the lines of Dave Barry to actually subvert and convert our brain-dead America right back. The fight is on, and it's funny. So grab a banana peel for America: pick up a copy of In Persuasion Nation today.