Weigel Room: Stories Frolic at the Border of Absurdity

Pop quiz: which of the following terms is “real”?

(a) The antiallergen Capaviv
(b) Taskbook for the New Nation
(c) Mini-steaks called SmallCows
(d) Reasonable Suspicion Clause

The correct answer may be “none of the above.” But it may just as well be “all of them.”

Throughout his newest collection of short stories, “In Persuasion Nation,” George Saunders constantly manipulates—and exaggerates—familiar words and situations just to the point where we must perform a double-take before laughing at their absurdity.

Since his first book, “CivilWarland in Bad Decline,” published in 1996, Saunders has made a name for himself and attracted a devoted fan-base by creating what reviewers love to hail as “dystopian fantasies.”

In “CivilWarland,” employees are subjected to horrific violence when some of the real dead simulated in their Civil War recreations come back to haunt them. In the eponymous theme-park of his second collection, “Pastoralia,” impatient visitors and their bratty children pay to observe individuals dressed up as Cro-Magnons, who are allowed to speak only in grunts in the ersatz cave that is their workplace. (They can curse at their own misbehaving offspring, fax evaluations of each other’s daily performance, chainsmoke, bicker, flirt, and so on, only after their 9-to-5).

“Dystopic” is one word to describe these scenarios; and, in some respects, the landscapes and neighborhoods of “Persuasion Nation” are similarly alien. They feel not so much like our “real” world as some dark parody of it.

However, the serious achievement of these mostly very funny narratives is their uncanny points of resemblance to our “real” reality—the reality of “reality” being something that Saunders, with his predilection for describing individuals trapped in hegemonic, perspective-maiming systems, often calls directly into question. This is a world “very much like” our own, as one pair of characters in “In Persuasion Nation” is shown “escaping the old folks’ home, going to live in the land of Doritos, which is not in Mexico, exactly, but is very much like Mexico.”

With its hypertrophied “realistic” tics—for instance, naming real places and real brand-names—Saunders’ vision of America is not so much unreal as hyper-real: rather like a Chuck Close painting, it is composed of parts that have a tendency to roil within themselves, or to fly off toward an entropy deforming the very figure whose representation they simultaneously create.

In “In Persuasion Nation,” perhaps to a greater extent than in his previous collections, Saunders often borrows from the language and stock characters of mass-market advertising. In the title story, for instance, the disembodied “voiceover” intones its way into scene after scene. It proves protean as it is omniscient. One minute, it is reassuring a man whose faithless girlfriend has been snatched away from him by a giant, apparently biped, Twinkie on-the-run, “not to worry, there’s more than enough sweetness to go around.” The next, it is taking the side of a foul-mouthed, sociopathic nutritional supplement in its countertop brawl with a defenseless orange (whom it eventually beats off the edge and into the garbage pail where it is leered at by a “perverted-looking chicken carcass”).

“The Slap of Whack Bar,” says the voiceover, “for when you’re feeling wacky!”

In several of the stories—and in the fictional “Taskbook for the New Nation,” from which he has lifted the epigraphs to the book’s four sections—Saunders also draws on the semantically void self-inflations of the vocabulary of the War on Terror.

“Our enemies will set among us individuals whose primary function is to object, to dissent, to find fault with our traditional mode of living, until that which we know to be right, begins to feel suspect,” Bernard “Ed” Alton, author of the “Taskbook” admonishes. “In the end, we must pity them: we are going forward with joy and hope; they are being left behind, mired in fear.”

We might compare these to internet lists of top-ten “Bushisms”: “The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself”; “America is rising to the task of history, and they expect the same of us”; “Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view.” Indeed.

At the same time that Saunders pokes fun at such bombastic statements of tautology, and at politicians’ unreflective pieties, he also alludes to the threat of violence that lies just below the surface of so many apparently banal pronouncements in praise of our freedom and values—or, as “Ed” puts it, the human right “to prefer this to that.”

In the story, “The Red Bow,” Saunders gives us perhaps the most explicit allegory of his vision of America’s slip down the slope toward war, following its misdirected push after 9/11—which he has discussed elsewhere in political essays. The protagonist, a nonspecifically small-town American father whose young daughter has been attacked and killed by a stray dog, moves from decking his town with FIGHT THE OUTRAGE posters to developing a “Three Point Emergency Plan” to sympathizing with his grieving wife’s demands: “Kill every dog, kill every cat…kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill them too.”

We are shown an alternative in the short story “Adams”: “I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear,” the story begins. As the quarrel between the narrator and his quirky neighbor escalates to the point where they have no choice but to try to kill each other and each other’s children, the vocabulary of “home” and “family” and “freedom” in which Saunders couches their fight reminds us of its basic similarity to global conflicts whose causes and aims are often articulated in the same words.

As even the briefest excerpts and paraphrases demonstrate, Saunders is a highly original writer, with a peculiar gift for presenting the familiar in new and bizarre combinations that force us to pay attention to what we might ordinarily take for granted.

If there is a criticism to be made of this book, it is that Saunders is growing too comfortable with his own mechanisms of prodding us to rediscovery. Overuse of certain kinds of speech errors and metaphors referring to popular culture can begin to make his characters feel too similar, and distract our attention from moments of real pathos in their stories.

When a speaker is made to repeat a characteristic malapropism one too many times, what usually seems like an intelligent technique for defamiliarizing us from our own speech starts to feel a bit too much like pointless and supercilious cruelty. It is one thing to have a character write “ourselfs” instead of “ourselves,” but it is a bit much to have him say of his friend’s daughter, “which that incident was, Baby Amber died.”

The indifference—or, at least, blasé inured-ness—to real violence that some of these stories contain is also troubling. It is one thing to set off violence in quotation marks, as it were—to foreground the kinds of grisly scenarios that television, movies, and video games cynically use to pique our voyeuristic interest for profit. However, there is a point at which one has to question whether the ironic distance implied from what is described renders these stories sufficiently interesting to justify its disturbing presence.

Having read a number of the books, I sometimes find myself asking, despite my affection for the writer and his ability reliably to amuse me, where his style can evolve from here. However, if you have never strolled through one of Saunders’ houses of mirrors—varyingly terrifying and “fun”—“In Persuasion Nation” is critical reading. I only hope that, if enough attend to what it diagnoses and predicts for American culture, that its prophecies may remain safely away in a realm only “like” and never fully our own.

—Staff writer Moira G. Weigel can be reached at weigel@fas.harvard.edu.

In Persuasion Nation
By George Saunders
Riverhead Hardcover
Out Now