With a surrealism that owes a lot to the real world of ordinary Americans, his stories offer sharp, moral parables of contemporary life in the US
Earlier this year, George Saunders wrote an article for the New Yorker about Donald Trump’s election campaign in which he described an America “intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse”, divided into “two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two sub-countries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems.”
This riven America has always been Saunders’s great subject: there is a reason why his first collection is called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, with its title story set in a war re-enactment theme park; and it is the same reason why, 20 years later, his forthcoming first novel focuses on Abraham Lincoln in the early 1860s. As symbols of American division go, none are greater or more terrible than the civil war.
Related: Guardian Books podcast: George Saunders and summer reading
Visa full. Also AmEx full and Discover nearly full. Called Discover: $200 avail. If we transfer $200 from checking (once paycheck comes in), would then have $400 avail. on Discover, could get cheetah. Although timing problematic. Currently, checking at zero. Paycheck must come, must put paycheck in checking pronto, hope paycheck clears quickly. And then, when doing bills, pick bills totalling $200 to not pay. To defer paying.
I sit on the deck of the barge with a semiautomatic. The water’s brown. As prescribed by federal regs, all inflow pipes are clearly labelled. RAW SEWAGE, says one. VERY POSSIBLY THORIUM, says another.
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.
Related: Tenth of December by George Saunders – a book to make you love people again
Oh, you break my heart. Why does everything have to be so sad to you? Why do you have so many negative opinions about things you don’t know about, like foreign countries and diseases and everything? Why can’t you be more like Chief Wayne? He has zero opinions. He’s just upbeat.
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