Satire for the media-savvy age

Alot has happened since George Saunders’ last collection of short stories, Pastoralia, made its appearance in 2000. The events of 9/11 happened, of course, plus years of war, paranoia and American turbulence. And all of this has made Saunders’ satirical vision even more disturbing and funny.

In Persuasion Nation opens with a piece about a customer service rep dealing with a disgruntled purchaser of the I CAN SPEAK!™ baby mask (which allows your child “to say something witty and self-possessed long before he or she would actually be able to say something witty and self-possessed”), and ends with a meditation (“commcomm”) on the afterlife.

Imagine, if you will, Kurt Vonnegut’s tragicomic view of humanity, mixed with Donald Barthelme’s postmodern inventiveness, sprinkled with some of David Foster Wallace’s deadpan humor, and you’ll begin to get at Saunders’ master plan in Pastoralia, with its caveman theme park denizens and trying-hard motivational speakers. It was a glimpse of economic recession, well before the recession hit, with all its voices tuned either to high-pitched panic or media dullness.

There’s a little Don DeLillo in Saunders’ voice, too; also some Charlie Kaufman; and yeah, even the humor that filters through The Office (American version) shares some psychic DNA.

Each section of In Persuasion Nation is prefaced with a quote from an imaginary best-selling tome of paranoia, Taskbook for a New Nation, which points to Saunders’ immediate areas of concern: media and product saturation, intolerance of social differences, the right to dissent, and a stubborn belief in falsehood. That these are so neatly categorized does not detract from enjoying In Persuasion Nation; indeed, the collection has a great deal more cohesion than Pastoralia and a great deal more depth than his last political fable/novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.

We are dealing here with America, but also the global economy, spreading its matrix of oneness and nothingness, its dulling blanket of product awareness, across the planet. Check out the grandfather of “My Flamboyant Grandson,” trying to navigate Times Square to bring his young-but-possibly-gay grandson Teddy to Babar Sings! on Broadway. It’s a Times Square that pulsates with advertising, and a government that requires every visitor to absorb as many commercial messages as possible (based on their “Personal Preference Worksheets”), or else face severe penalties. In the bizarre barrage of electronic billboards and shouted come-ons, one may escape only by removing one’s shoes — yet doing so, and disconnecting the mobile electronic message readers embedded there, can only cause trouble. (Readers will detect a slight nod to the ‘60s comedy act The Firesign Theatre in this piece: the surreal blur of advertising and cliché, the paranoiac theme parks, the admonition “Don’t take off your shoes!” recalling comedy albums like “Don’t Crush That Dwarf [Hand Me the Pliers]” and “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”)

It’s clear each piece in Saunders’ latest collection is going to grow increasingly more surreal, each charting a dystopian universe, each slice concerning a human or a pair of humans who finds it increasingly difficult to “just go along.”

Just then the baby kicked my hand, which at that time was on Carolyn’s stomach.

And Carolyn was like, You are either with me or agin me.

Which was so funny, because she was proving my point! Because you are either with me or agin me is what the Lysol bottle at LI 120009 says to the scrubbing sponge as they approach the grease stain together which is making at them a threatening fist while wearing a sort of Mexican bandolera!

When I pointed this out, she removed my hand from her belly.

There’s a constant thread of humanity here, as the dissenters find it crushingly difficult to buck the odds. At times, Saunders crosses the line from sublime fiction to polemic, as in “Brad Carrigan, American,” which envisions America as a TV sitcom in which canned laughter and sexual innuendo prevent the “stars” from contemplating African AIDS babies or Filipino children scavenging on garbage heaps (really). Or in the title piece, which takes on TV advertising in a tsk-tsking tone that’s as overbearing as the commercials being lampooned. It’s here that Saunders loses his subtle touch, screaming his message rather than insinuating it.

But the eerie sci-fi touches of “Jon,” the Twilight Zone paranoia of “The Red Bow” (which takes direct aim at 9/11’s legacy of fear and profiling) and the deft observation in “Christmas” mark Saunders as a humanist, if often a bleak one. The characters he creates here are touching, poignant: soldiers of the working class, destined to play out their roles but offered one big break — an escape plan that might lead to their doom, but is worth the effort nonetheless. 

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long, you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

He’s also quite funny, though never as riotous as his wordplay was in Pastoralia; here, the tone of elegiac satire permeates, leaving you in wonder, though never in stitches. “Commcomm” investigates what happens after we die with surprisingly ghoulish touches, yet comes around to a conclusion that would not be out of place in a Mitch Albom book. Yet it’s the bizarre side roads that Saunders takes to get there which make all the difference, and make it one of the collection’s most moving stories.