“Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers” opens the first two lines of the absurdist dystopian short story, CommComm. From those two simple opening lines I was launched into the almost bizarrely bewildering world of George Saunders.
George Saunders is an American essayist, novelist, and short story writer whose work has come to prominence in the last twenty years. Somewhat reminiscent of Vonnegut, there are very little words one could use to describe the writing of George Saunders accurately. From his very first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, he set a precedent of strangely satirical and almost incomprehensibly genius fiction.
In as brief of terms as possible, Saunders’ work can be summarized as a series of increasingly odd dystopian short stories that make unique criticisms of American capitalism and consumerism. In his preface to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline he writes: “Why is the world so harsh on those who are losing?” Coming from a lower-class background, he originally got a degree from the Colorado School of Mines and briefly worked as a geophysicist in oil fields of Sumatra. There he would contract a Simian virus, which in a roundabout way, made him quite certain that his calling wasn’t engineering, but rather writing.
He then got a degree in creative writing from Syracuse University and found himself working a mind-numbing job as a technical writer in some rather bland, no-faced company. It was at that job where he began secretly writing CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and against that backdrop of corporate mundanity that he developed his distinctly humorous but critical style.
After CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a short story collection featuring a series of anecdotes and accounts from the members of a failing immersive theme park based on the American Civil War, he published four more short story collections, a series of collected essays, and his magnum opus, the novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
While his short story collections surely got his name in people’s mouths – particularly his brilliant collection Tenth of December of which the story “Escape From Spiderhead” was recently turned into an (admittedly poor) movie in 2022 starring Chris Hemsworth – it’s his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo that really put him on the map. Published in 2017, this experimental novel deals with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln, and uses a series of monologues by different narrators (the ghosts who inhabit the space between life and rebirth, or the titular “bardo”) to discuss Lincoln’s grief over the event. The novel won that year’s Man Booker Prize and was a national bestseller in the U.S. according to The New York Times and USA Today. The audiobook version of the book is also particularly delightful seeing as to capture the full extent of the novel, each ghost is voiced by a different person. The cast of the audiobook is also star-studded, featuring Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation and more recently The Last of Us, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rainn Wilson, and Ben Stiller as well as a few other household names.
My favourite of Saunders’ work is a short story from his 2000 collection Pastoralia. It’s the third story in the collection, a rather brief, hilarious, and critical take on poverty and the spirit of humanity called “Sea Oak.” Without giving too much away, it tells the story of an unnamed narrator who works as a male stripper at a club called Joysticks in some not so far off dystopian version of America. He lives in a small apartment with his sister, his cousin, their two kids respectively, and his Aunt Bernie. The main plot surrounds Aunt Bernie, who begins the novel as a kind and caring character who does her best to take care of the other characters after their mother abandoned them. Aunt Bernie dies early in the short story and this is where the fun of the story begins. After dying, Aunt Bernie returns as an embittered, shrewd, lewd, zombie who arrives back at the apartment to make life for the other characters somewhat of a living hell and maybe teach them a few lessons along the way. It’s an absolute spectacle of a short story and a brilliantly fun read, as well as a good introduction to the dark, crazy, and dazzling world of George Saunders.
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