I can recall the precise moment I went from thinking that George Saunders was a talented writer of funny stories to thinking that he might be a genuine Swiftian force in American fiction, a satirist who so ably captured the risible absurdity of our age that he seemed capable of causing real damage. In one passage from “Bounty,” his brilliant 1995 novella, a slavemaster in a barbaric America of the near future explains to his newly purchased human chattels the nature of their relationship — but in the language of a garrulous, enlightened CEO who’s just returned from a three-day human resources retreat. He can’t offer them their freedom, he tells them regretfully, but he’ll gladly foot the bill for an end-of-the-year barbecue blowout, interior-decoration allowances for their slave quarters, even “meditation classes and miniseminars on certain motivational principles we can all put to work in our lives.” He wants, he says, for his slaves to feel “empowered,” to exhibit “directedness.”
Everything you need to know about what makes Saunders such an essential literary figure for our time is right there. The elements that define that brief passage have evolved by now into a unique and inimitable style, one well-suited to an era that pits smooth-voiced plutocrats against the 47 percent. For starters, there’s the dystopian setting, suggestive of some environmental or economic calamity that has sent America reeling backward into an unlovely aspect of its past. There’s also his focus on the way power imbalances become formalized in our everyday activities. If not actually enslaved, Saunders’s sad-sack heroes are frequently employed in dispiriting dead-end jobs. He’s especially fond of imagining them as low-wage performers or historical reenactors in perverse theme parks and tableaux vivants, where their degradation is presented as middlebrow entertainment for the wealthy.
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