San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Words are a balm in a combative world
The first line of George Saunders’ acutely relevant collection of new stories: “It is third day of Interim.” Immediately, we ask: Interim? Why capitalized? Could Interim refer to our lives during COVID (maybe not over)? To the Trump years (maybe not over)? To our time on this planet (also not over, at least not yet)?
This is one of Saunders’ tricks, to write directly to the world of the story while writing to us out here in our chairs, our streets, our workplaces, and to our politics and public discourse. He provides a mirror, albeit a wonderfully distorted one.
“Liberation Day” also marks the end of an interim for Saunders himself, as this is his first collection since he was catapulted to national fame with “Tenth of December” almost 10 years ago. He was great with Abraham Lincoln and Russian literature, but let’s bask in this new collection of short stories, which is how many of us first discovered him and where he excels like no other.
Back to the title story. The line is spoken by a man “Pinioned” to a “Speaking Wall,” forced to “Speak” with two other “Speakers” controlled by a certain Ahabian Mr. U. How our narrator got there or what world would allow such a situation is never quite explained.
There are shades of Samuel Beckett throughout the collection, and in this story in particular: humans placed in a wholly absurd situation (life itself ?), and what makes it absurd is that no one questions it. One also thinks of corporate America demanding we perform tasks for those more powerful and usually for their, not always our, benefit. And no matter where we are in the system,
we’ll always be controlled by something.
Saunders’ imaginative capacity is on full display when the story morphs into a retelling of Custer’s Last Stand, which the Speakers must re-enact for “Company.” The Speakers are, at one point, injected with “Knowledge Mode” and “given facts. Real facts. Which are helpful,” Saunders writes. Indeed, they are. What results is a re-enactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most egregious displays of
hubris in the history of the United States.
When a group of leftists barges in to liberate the Speakers, the response is violence, a violence that haunts many of these new stories. Saunders shows — with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack fresh in our minds — how easily violence can become the answer to maintaining the status quo and resolving our clashing worldviews.
“Liberation Day” carries echoes of Saunders’ previous work, but the ideas in this collection are more complex and nuanced, perhaps reflecting the new complexities of this brave new world of ours. The title story is only one of a handful of the nine stories in this collection that show us our collective and personal dilemmas,
but in reading the problems so expressed — with compassion and humanity — our spirits are raised and perhaps healed. Part of the Saunders elixir is that we feel more empathetic after reading his work.
Ezra Pound said, “Literature is news that stays news.” In this collection, Saunders makes us stare bold-faced at the news, but one can’t help hoping that someday, somehow, we might do something to change the news coming out of our world — and do it together.
Scott Laughlin’s work has appeared in Guernica, the Common, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. He teaches at San Francisco University High School.