Reading George Saunders in the modern day is frustrating.
Saunders, lauded as one of the greatest short story writers and prose stylists since Donald Barthelme, mixes surreal and exaggerated portraits of American life taken to its furthest extremes. His stories often utilize focused, pathos-laden character sketches to create dystopian nightmarescapes where people are ultimately trapped and destroyed by their own capitalistic aims. His America, as seen in books like The Braindead Megaphone (2007) and Pastoralia (2000), is one of grotesque excess, unchecked capitalism, and odd moments of beauty within all the dehumanizations of modern life usually marked by the appearance of ghosts. As a craftsman Saunders is nigh unmatched, but as his career has progressed, strangely his work has remained mired in the time when it first catapulted onto the literary stage. In practice, rather than change with the times, Saunders’ work has decided to remain somewhat mired in the quaintness of the 1980s and 1990s when it was first discovered.
The best example of this is his landmark 1996 collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, an acerbic short story cycle where sad, pathetic people are trapped in hells of their own making—most taking the shape of amusement parks or tourist traps—because they either cannot or will not leave an absurd and toxic situation. As a complete work, it weaves a tapestry of horrid moments, a mid-apocalyptic view of America as “Disneyland with the death penalty” to borrow a phrase. Saunders’s America is a place rife with slavery (both contractual and blatant), exploitation (ninety-year-old museum workers, people who refuse ambition getting taken advantage of in their daily lives as well as at their jobs), and skullduggery (usually murder or infidelity, occasionally psychological abuse).
In the context of its time, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is an acidic broadside against popular culture. It combines the horrors of ‘90s sanitized theme park culture, the putrid truth of “upward mobility” lies spread throughout the 1980s, and the by-then tired tropes of “American pathos” seen in short stories written by the likes of Raymond Carver and plays like Death of a Salesman. Rather than the inherent nobility of a lowly everyman crushed by the weight of the American Dream, Saunders’ protagonists are grotesque losers trapped by their own desire for upward mobility and a complete lack of morality. The pathetic middle manager in the titular story is pushed around by his boss into letting a shell-shocked serial-murdering war vet shoot “the gangs” in the park. “The Wavemaker Falters” has a man trapped by guilt and a lack of ambition working at an Action Park-esque tourist trap. When the protagonists of CivilWarLand stand up for themselves, it’s viewed as a token gesture that immediately gets steamrolled—Jeffrey of “The 400 Pound CEO” engineers an imperfect coup and ends up in prison, the narrator of “Bounty” repeatedly chases freedom over safety despite his empty idealism and optimism being the thing that got him in his situation in the first place. There’s no dignity in CivilWarLand, by design. Everything is grotesque, every situation is made immensely worse, and any “saintliness” in “the other” is steamrolled out. The American Dream is a justification for acts of horror and racism perpetuated by and upon those less fortunate, the only grace anyone gets is either being without sin or with great self-sacrifice.
While it can be appreciated through its contextual history, there are some…issues with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline that are more obvious in the modern day. A streak of condescension runs through the pieces, Saunders putting himself not quite above the fray but removed from it, commenting on the action. It’s also interesting to note who the unfortunates in these pathetic situations tend to be—a number of them feature stories that linger on the characters’ physical and mental deformities almost as an indicator of their failings. This manifests most egregiously with “Bounty,” where physically deformed characters are a marginalized race forced into slavery, racism, and fetishization but for some inexplicable reason contains mostly white-presenting protagonists in its racism metaphor. This appearance-based discrimination only becomes worse in light of how Saunders treats his characters of color in CivilWarLand, mostly ciphers meant to act as either an antagonizing force (“CivilWarLand,”) or a victimized one (Norris from “Isabelle”) but never really fleshed out. While Saunders’s characters are complicit in their own downfall, it feels like they end up in that situation to begin with because they were born that way more than anything else.
That also extends to Saunders’s women—they’re portrayed as shrews or defenders of the status quo throughout, cruelly manipulating Jeffrey in “The 400 Pound CEO,” complaining about the empathy shown by the men around them in “Isabelle” and “Bounty,” or being used as a goad for the desperate acts in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” When they’re viewpoint characters, they also tend to exist with a petty lack of empathy, as when the narrator casually mentions that she’s been poisoning the see-through cows in “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror,” her main reason being the downfall of her hated rival’s pet project at the museum. When the women aren’t portrayed as empathy-devoid villains, they’re victims—Mrs. Schwartz in the story that bears her name is subjected to repeated mindwipes, Isabelle is barely able to take care of herself and is more a narrative device, and the narrator’s sister in “Bounty” is, while a deconstruction of the “damsel in distress” trope (which is at least a little unnerving in that she was sold into marriage and is thus portrayed as happy with her own imprisonment), more something to keep the male protagonist going forward than any kind of character in her own right.
While Saunders is presumably punching up, he tends to spend his time doing so in a way that also kicks downward with every stroke, a ballet of attacking those in power while sneering at and pitying those beneath him. It creates an odd balance of both sympathy and disgust, selling an apocalyptic dystopia where senior citizens are forced to work well past retirement age and people employed at crumbling businesses must resort to immoral and unnatural acts just to keep their limping concepts on life support for a few weeks longer. Despite all the issues with race, gender, and disability, that sympathy and some absolutely divine sentence crafting keeps the collection barely within bounds; The blind spots can be written off as a younger writer in the apathy and edge of the 1990s and clearly the message, while clumsily executed for the 2020s, still rings out with the empathy and care put into the stories.
Or that would be the case if Saunders weren’t still doing the same thing but worse almost thirty years later, which brings us to Liberation Day. Released in 2022 to great fanfare and numerous podcast appearances, Liberation Day similarly tackles portraits of American life in Saunders’ surrealist reality, with more tales of decaying tourist attractions, memory-altered victims of capitalism, and beats of melancholic horror as the world gleefully descends into dystopia. Saunders still has both his ability to craft beautiful sentences—the narrator’s disjointed backyard epiphany in “Elliot Spencer” before he wanders off into the night is a highlight as is the strangely euphoric descriptions of massacre in “Liberation Day”—but as much as he’s grown as a writer, he’s also become a victim of his rarified environment. Liberation Day lacks what its predecessor had in pathos; a sense of empathy towards the downtrodden. It’s replaced with a sense of disdain and annoyance at the world around it, a belief that people lack the psychological capacity or will to self-liberate.
Saunders casts himself as lecturer from his place on high as much as someone presenting his portraits of horrifying dystopian life. This much is clear in “Love Letter,” an anti-Trump essay in the guise of a grandfather writing to his grandson about their repressive fascist dictatorship and the legal troubles his grandson’s friend faces that reads like a New Yorker-fied version of Vox’s Leslie Knope letter. No longer merely outside the fray, Saunders is also above it, condemning those he once viewed as pathetic now as outright pitiable, foolish, and partially responsible for their own predicaments. It, combined with his usual issues with race and gender, casts a pall over the work, blaming the oppressed for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and liberating themselves. It also makes the entire thing lean eerily to the right politically: the titular “Liberation Day,” with its childish narrator and equally childish revolutionaries, depicts a system where everyone’s simply too immature to actually shake off oppression.“Elliott Spencer,” when it’s not a sci-fi rehash of conspiracy theories about “crisis actors,” (a weirdly right-wing point from such a left-wing author) spends its length wringing dark slapstick from brainwashed transients in a way that would probably come off as less ableist if it wasn’t so condescending. “Ghoul” similarly continues this right-wing bent, blaming theocratic mob justice in a story that, when taken holistically within the collection, comes off as Saunders whining about “cancel culture.”
Saunders also still has his problems with women, class, and race; The women of his stories are portrayed with a “madonna-shrew” complex where they’re either innocent and long-suffering or in some way morally bankrupt, whether that’s using sex to get ahead of a spiteful underling who steals office supplies, performing sex acts with a mental toddler who can’t and won’t say no, or being the cheerful face of oppression and mob violence. The difference is, with the “you are doing this to yourselves” tone Saunders takes in Liberation Day’s screeds, it reads upsettingly like a lecture on “proper behavior.”
The only semblance of the (imperfect) balance struck in CivilWarLand is in the final story of the collection, “My House,” which details the darkly hilarious lengths one man goes to, all to stalk not a person but a building that was never really his to begin with. In that final moment, suddenly Saunders seems to come to his senses and delivers something more heartfelt and biting, though the idea of buying a large house is something mainly experienced by the average member of his fanbase and never by the people he purportedly champions.
This depressing thought is what lays bare Saunders’ hypocrisy– for all he wrote about the horrors of American life and capitalism, the people he is writing for and the position he is writing from are looking down upon those most victimized by those horrors. In Saunders’ stories, they are seen as objects of pity or ugly victims, the inherent realities of their situation drowned out by the surreal grotesquery he insists on adding until it becomes mean-spirited. He’s detached, further as the years go by, an angry young man who had some interesting thoughts now having moved to the suburbs of White Plains while still thinking he’s in touch with the common people.
As much as Saunders has ideas about America, he has more in common with the America he purportedly hates than anyone hurt by it, and his work suffers immensely from that divide.
Sam Reader is a literary and film critic specializing in horror and weird fiction reluctantly haunting the northeastern United States. In addition to their biweekly column Dissecting the Dark Descent for Reactor Magazine, their work can also be found at Ancillary Review of Books, Boss Rush, The Gamer’s Lounge, and at their personal site, strangelibrary.com. When not ranting about art and culture, they can be found drinking too much coffee, hoarding secondhand books, and trying not to annoy anyone too much.