George Saunders: satirist

Progressive, The, June, 2006 by Nina Siegal

American fiction has become a largely apolitical affair in recent years, with even the savviest social novelists, such as Jonathan Franzen, shrinking from sweeping cultural critiques. A notable exception is George Saunders, the contemporary master of the darkly comic short story, and the closest thing our literary moment has to Mark Twain.

"He's one of the only effective social satirists writing fiction today," says Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine, which has published at least one or two Saunders stories a year since the mid-1990s.

The author of two acclaimed short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders has also written a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and a children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. In April, Riverhead released his third collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation, which Publisher's Weekly calls "his best work yet."

A Saunders story typically operates by some gross exaggeration of contemporary life, set in a not-too-distant future where things have gone irrevocably haywire. His admixture of comedy and pathos, absurdity and realism, and his playful touch make it so you barely feel the political sting. But it's there.

Saunders doesn't love the term "political" to describe his work. Any attempt to advocate a particular political stance would be "death for storytelling, because it implies a kind of incuriosity," he tells me, and because "fiction should always be ... complicating our habitual view of things."

By the same token, he believes in "ethical" fiction. "The main thing that fiction does is rev up the quality of our awareness, make us more involved in the world, more enamored of it," he says. "And this feels political, maybe, especially in a culture like ours, where so much of what we do is infused with dullness and materialist sloth. Fiction is a way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves, which is a very radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that voice and forcing it into acquiescence."

As far as his own politics, Saunders says, "I'm pretty far left but trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of both political stripes."

Born in 1958 and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Saunders says he was inspired to write by reading Hemingway--and by a high school teacher he had a crush on. But he didn't take the usual route. In 1981, he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and went to work on an oil exploration crew in Sumatra.

For a while after graduation, he had a series of odd jobs, working as a knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse in Texas, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and then a roofer in Chicago. In the mid-1980s, he decided to go back to school, this time to study writing at Syracuse University in upstate New York, where he worked with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger.

After receiving his MFA, he worked as a technical writer and environmental engineer for almost a decade, completing his first book, CivilWarLand, by sneaking it in at work, he says.

During this time, he submitted several short stories to The New Yorker, and David McCormick, the then-assistant fiction editor, responded with a positive letter to one of them, "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror." McCormick and the then-senior fiction editor, Dan Menaker, asked him to send more work, and Saunders submitted a couple more stories that were also rejected. When Tina Brown took over the magazine, he tried again, submitting "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz," a story from the CivilWarLand collection. That was the winner.

"I was out working at Fort Drum in Watertown, doing a groundwater investigation for the Corps of Engineers with another guy from our company, and got a message at, of all places, the MicroTel, saying they'd accepted the piece," he recalls. "Needless to say, a big night ensued."

CivilWarLand was published in 1996, and the next year Syracuse University hired him as a temporary creative writing teacher. He's been there ever since, and is now an associate professor in the English Department, teaching in the Creative Writing Program.

It's hard to make satire appealing in fiction, says Treisman, who is also Saunders's editor at The New Yorker. Too often, readers get the feeling "they're having their heads beaten on with a hammer," she says. "That's George's gift. I never feel as if I'm being beaten over the head."

The same is not true for Saunders's characters. They are often being beaten over the head, berated into submission, absurdly dehumanized by senseless and mean corporate-style overlords, most of them barely literate.

Take, for example, the main character of "Pastoralia," perhaps Saunders's most famous story, from the 2000 book of the same name, in which the narrator and a woman named Janet perform the roles of prehistoric man and mate in a financially failing Human History theme park. They are required to fax their bosses Daily Partner Performance Evaluations, and then live together in harmony. The faceless owners of the theme park send the performers notes--and less and less goat to eat every day. Meanwhile, Janet's real family is falling apart, largely due to the fact that she can't sustain her son on her paltry salary.