Civil Warland In Bad Decline. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Ron Tanner

CIVIL WARLAND IN BAD DECLINE by George Saunders. New York: Random House, 1996. 179 pages. $22.

Reading George Saunders, in Civil War Land in Bad Decline, is like listening to a fairly good sax player jam. His improvisations are, at times, exhilarating, for he creates wildly original, otherworldly scenarios of near-future America. Most of these take place in decrepit theme parks run by megalomaniacal, thoroughly unscrupulous bosses who victimize, if not ruin, the pliant, well-meaning, but thoroughly ineffectual underlings who are the narrators of the stories. The title story, about a Civil War theme park terrorized by teenaged gangsters, opens:

   Whenever a potential big investor comes for the tour the first thing I do
   is take him out to the transplanted Erie Canal Lock. We've got a good
   ninety feet of actual Canal out there and a well-researched diorama of a
   coolie campsite. Were our faces ever red when we found out it was actually
   the Irish who built the Canal.

It's this kind of throwaway, wry detail that compels a reader to turn the page--for a while, at least.

Most of the six stories and one novella in Saunders's collection are as simple as a 12-bar blues and proceed as follows: the main character, a lowly yes-man in an unfeeling organization, usually a theme park, tells his own tale of woe; he's disdained by his wife, or he's disdained generally, for having no better career options and for taking so much abuse from his boss; ultimately threatened or duped by his boss, he ends up compromising what little integrity he has left and this gets him fired, maimed, or killed. In the title story, for instance, the feckless narrator--at his boss's insistence--hires a dysfunctional Vietnam vet to scare off marauding teen gangs. Overzealous, the vet kills a boy for stealing penny candy from the General Store. The narrator helps conceal the murder, and so begins his downward spiral and the escalation of the body count.

Saunders's primary strength is his invention: his near-future theme-park Americas are unlike anything you'll find in short stories these days. But invention, like jamming, is pleasurable only up to a point. Ultimately, the writer should have something to say--and Saunders rarely does. He's just jamming. The reader can too easily imagine Saunders making all of this up as he goes along, as if coaxing himself riff after riff: "Okay, this happens next, and then this ... and then.... "As a consequence, his stories have an episodic, stapled-together feel. In "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror," the narrator, Mary, a 92-year-old peon in a theme park that features "see-through" cows (a window implanted in each flank of their midsections) mentions that the cows have been dying, much to the nasty park owner's chagrin. Only near the story's end do we learn that Mary herself is killing the cows. This seems an afterthought. Had we known early on that Mary is the culprit, she would have been a more interesting character. Coming as late as it does, however, Mary's poisoning of the cows seems half-hearted at best. The story ends with her attempting suicide after she loses her job. There seems no message here, only that Mary--like the rest of Saunders's characters--is profoundly alone and miserable.

At first glance, Saunders seems to care for these losers. He is sympathetic, after all, since he takes their point of view (always in the first person) and, occasionally, he gives them a break--or, at least, a glimpse of redemption, as when, in "OffLoading for Mrs. Schwartz," the owner of a failing virtual reality franchise tries to please a needy client by siphoning his own memory into his computer's database, thereby making himself stupid. It's a sacrifice offered for apparently humane reasons, though one could argue, too, that the man is simply desperate to make a success of himself no matter what the cost. In another story, "Isabella," after years of witnessing the daily brutalities and hate crimes of urban America (probably LA), a young man adopts a deformed, paraplegic neighbor--a girl--whose father was himself a hate monger. The point of the story, I suppose, is that love prevails (the young man's father and brother were nearly as odious as the girl's father), though Saunders makes no attempt to finger even the shallowest recesses of the young man's mind.

At worst, it appears that Saunders is doing nothing more than torturing his characters to sec how they squirm. In his picaresque novella, "Bounty," he uses a flimsy device--a young man's sister is sold into slavery and shipped to New Mexico--as an excuse to send a mutant Candide on foot through post-apocalyptic America, where, at every turn, the young man is chased, degraded, and beaten. Why should a reader witness such ugliness? In "The 400-Pound CEO," the forever-ridiculed, obese Jeffrey accidentally kills his criminal boss while preventing the man from raping a woman. Due to his poor handling of the incident, and his co-workers' scorn, Jeffrey is sent to prison for life, where we leave him murmuring his hope that some day, somehow, he'll be "a slighter and more beautiful baby, destined for a different life, in which I am masterful, sleek as a deer, a winner." Jeffrey speaks for all of Saunders's losers, but he is hardly convincing, and this reader is left murmuring, as Jeffrey does at one point, "I'm sorry, but I feel that life should offer more than this."