There are certain points in my life that I always associate with a particular song, or book, or painting. Like when I think of my last year of high school, I think of Cake (the band, not the food) and Picasso’s “weeping women” series.  Likewise, when I think of my last semester of university, one of the first things that comes to mind is George Saunders’ stories, particularly “Sea Oak” and “Bounty.”

This isn’t so odd, considering that I was taking a lit seminar at the time called something like Utopias and Dystopias. In the latter category came Saunders’ hilariously bleak tale of under-privilege, “Sea Oak,” and suddenly all my friends and I were telling each other, “You’re such an optometrist!” (Read the story. You’ll get it. It’s funny.)

This was also the spring of 2002. The planes felt like they were flying closer to the ground than they used to. Fake bomb threats—someone’s desperate attempt to get out of that math midterm—suddenly involved the FBI. Some kid was taken out of class because his brother’s wife’s cousin’s pimp’s podiatrist’s dog-groomer’s nephew was caught reading a Koran in an airport. 

Dystopia: like I used to explain to my students, those enthusiasts for the monosyllabic and the pared down, it’s the worst of all possible worlds.  And as my professor told us that spring, the best dystopic scenarios are the ones most likely to take place. And that’s where Saunders’ power as a story teller is most impressive. It’s not that difficult to spin a crazy yarn set in the distant, unhappy future; take some pills, watch La Jetee with the sound off and some Underworld playing, and you’re good to go. What really takes skill is to make method out of the madness. 

In his latest collection, In Persuasion Nation, Saunders serves up a delirious blend of absurdity, wit and socio-political commentary, sans soap box antics. I say served up not to ape the painfully unclever lingo of pop culture criticism, but to point to a recurring theme in Saunders’ stories. The title page features an image of a TV dinner so unappetizing even Fat Jerry wouldn’t eat it. This image also appears as the header to every other chapter, alternating with a simple white flower. Either way, our world is one is which things are served to us, and we take them. Our world, with the compartmentalized, bland plastic-cased dinners we eat, bleary eyed as the TV tells us what to think, becomes in “Jon” a world in which babies are sold into slavery, raised by corporations to be test-subjects for new-and-improved crap. Instead of bulky televisions— even those flat screens—devices are implanted in the subject’s brains so that it’s impossible for them to tell what’s a memory and what’s a recalled advert.  In “I CAN SPEAK!™,” a salesman is pitching the I CAN SPEAK™ mask, which, placed over an infant’s face, translates the cooing gaga speak into speech that sounds like it came out of a 1920’s British novel. For a few bucks more, you can have the mask customized to be a replica of your kid’s face. It’s a farce as Baudrillard might have imagined one. 

In “Brad Carrigan, American,” Saunders gives us a reality-tv show gone awry, where once again the line between reality and simulacra is blurred.  Brad and Doris Carrigan, whose lives are taped 24/7 for the viewing public, watch another reality program called Final Twist, a concept so hilarious and harrowing it deserves to be quoted:

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 InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, 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.

The cannibalism made literal here extends throughout Saunders’ stories as a crazed cycle of consumption.  His fascinated horror at brand name culture, which goes back to his earlier works, comes to a head in the title story. In Persuasion Nation, life is literally a series of TV commercials, and those spurned, fooled and screwed-over in advertisements look for revenge. For example, there’s Jim, whose best friend drives a very nice car. It’s a “Pontiac Sophisto: so sophisticated, it might just make you trick your best friend into dangling a brick from his penis!” Of course, the play on “sophist” goes to underscore the slippery, inflated language of advertising. Jim joins up with a bust of Voltaire who’s been violated by a can of insect repellent, a polar bear who gets a daily axe to the head to protect the family’s cola supply, and a granny who’s been left to die because her grandson can’t get away from his MacAttack meal. A corner of a power bar grows into an enormous green God, making literal the “In God We Trust” bit on your dollar bill. 

It’s the polar bear with the axe in his head who questions the power of this God and the logic of a world in which life is literally lives through commercials. He wonders, “Was selling stuff what all that suffering was really about?” It’s a seemingly absurd yet poignant look at our own world.  We are in Persuasion Nation. And the prognosis is not good: the bear’s outcry—"The green symbol is a false GOD!  Free your minds and live!"—is rejected by his audience, a gaggle of penguins who are, frankly, embarrassed by such an earnest display. As most of us are when, say, we see the homeless man at the entry to the train station, talking about how the prison industrial complex is this century’s holocaust, or when the unbathed middle-aged hippie rails against the war. “He needs meds,” we think, “she needs a shower.” “Grow up.” We suppress that twinge that, maybe, we actually agree with the man in the trash bag coat. Maybe we do believe that things could be better than they are But god, what an effort, and we fall, like Saunders’ penguins, “maniacally dancing the mindless penguin dance of joy” as Skittles rain down from the sky.

Amongst Saunders’ exceptional tales, the one that haunted me was “The Red Bow,” an allegory of the aftermath of 9/11. A trio of rabid dogs assaults and kills a young girl, and the efforts to destroy the dogs quickly escalates into a movement to kill all animals, and dissenting humans.  The dead girl’s red bow becomes and easy-reference symbol in the town’s “you’re with us or against us” reaction to the attacks, even though it’s not even her bow, but a bigger, brighter one chosen for affect.  The language is eerily familiar:

All Infected or Suspected Infected animals, once destroyed, must be burned at once…

Then someone asked could they please clarify the meaning of ‘suspected’?

Suspected, you know, said Uncle Matt.  That means we suspect and have good reason to suspect that an animal is, or may be, Infected.  The exact methodology is under development.

And later, the dead child’s mother says, “Kill every dog, every cat, she said very slowly. Kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill them too.” The real tragedy of the story is in how quickly the victim is forgotten, as the town is swept up in unfocused, all-encompassing hatred. The thing about consumer culture, as Saunders shows us, is that it goes both ways—you consume the product as the ideology consumes you. The malaise of Persuasion Nation is that if you refuse to be consumed, if you question the consumption, the consumer and the consumed, then it’s off with your head, like our polar bear friend. And that ain’t right, people.  America should not be Persuasion Nation.  Or, as the narrator of “My Flamboyant Grandson” says:

What America is, to me, is a guy doesn’t want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let’s go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.

And at the risk of sounding like an optometrist, I’ll say, Amen.