George Saunders: In Persuasion Nation

[Shade]

I got through George Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation (bundled in the UK with his 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and issued under the latter title) probably as quickly as I did with his previous collection Pastoralia, in a day or so. This might weigh against any assessment of it, since the one thing we know about books of stories is they suffer when read end to end. But that's happy news, as it means my opinion can only be adjusted upwards, and it starts pretty high up to begin with.

Which is another way of saying that I thoroughly enjoyed almost all of In Persuasion Nation. Each story does however comply pretty tightly with the patented Saunders formula which is familiar to anyone who's read his two earlier collections, of having at its heart overwhelming pathos and/or absurd commercialism. And I'm not sure I see significant progress from Pastoralia in this respect, though one interesting development is that this time round, by and large, the longer stories are the best, whereas before (Bounty, Pastoralia) the length seemed to dilute their effect.

Which is not to denounce such shorts as the highly amusing I Can Speak!TM which, like all of Saunders' fiction, lets us into its insane world via the back door, in this case a world where parents buy $2,000 masks to place over their babies' (or in some cases, senile relatives') faces to give them the impression of being able to speak before they really can. Or, as the salesman from the company says (the whole story takes the form of a letter to a parent who has returned her I Can Speak!):

We at KidLuv really love what kids are, Mrs Faniglia, which is why we want them to become something better as soon as possible.

Advertising and mass media is Saunders' biggest target in the collection, featuring in five of the twelve stories, including the weakest of the bunch, the title story, where put-upon objects in TV commercials fight back. It's excessively silly to make its satirical point (which is better made elsewhere in the book) and goes on for too long.

But the subject also inspires the best stories here, including Brad Carrigan, American, where the eponymous character in a TV show struggles to become more a three-dimensional and morally complex being. In the TV show ("We see from the way the corpses, devastated by memory, collapse back into the dust of the familiar Carrigan backyard, and from the sad tragic Eastern European swell of the music, that it's time for a commercial"), the characters themselves watch TV shows, which enables Saunders to get really angry at anyone who has ever defended sensationalism and exploitation as good television:

On FinalTwist, five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the Initial Twist. During the dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the Second Twist. The Third Twist is that, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.

"What a riot," says Doris.

"Doris, come on," says Brad. "These are real people, people with thoughts and hopes and dreams."

"Well, nobody got hurt," says Chief Wayne.

"Except those kids who unknowingly ate their own mothers," says Brad.

"Well, they signed the releases," says Chief Wayne.

"Releases or not, Wayne, come on," says Brad. "They killed people. They tricked people into eating their own mothers."

"I don't know that I'm all that interested in the moral ins and outs of it," says Chief Wayne. "I guess I'm just saying I enjoyed it."

"It's interesting, that's the thing," says Doris. "The expectations, the reversals, the timeless human emotions."

"Who wouldn't want to watch that?" says Chief Wayne.

"Interesting is good, Brad," says Doris. "Surprising is good."

It's consciously unsubtle, but for me at least, it's amusing and effective. Also in this vein we have the long story Jon, set in a world where babies are bought by a market research corporation and implanted with "gargadisks" which enable them to assess products and advertisements for the rest of their lives. It sounds ponderous and heavy-handed but it becomes highly moving and tentatively optimistic by the close, akin to the end of The Truman Show. And again, we only come to understand what's happening via our own interpretations of what the characters say; Saunders is expert at ensuring they never go outside their area of experience, which makes the realisation of their reality all the more jarring when we work it out.

In the pathos category of story this time among the best are Adams, showing a bizarre strain of paedophile paranoia ("I never could stomach Adams and then one day he's standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids' room! So I wonk him on the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes"), and Bohemians, about two women of Eastern European extraction who move in to the narrator's street.

So it's MegaBusiness as usual for George Saunders, plus of course The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil thrown in too. Maybe he would get the sales he deserves if they advertised his books on TV. Time for a commercial.

 

[Kenny Shovel]

Good review, thanks.