-- Voltaire, in Candide
This is George Saunders's first book of fiction (see {sidebar hed tk}), but already he's tackling big issues: environmental breakdown, the collapse of the US infrastructure, and how to bail out of a crazy-making job even though you need the health-insurance coverage. Most of his characters are marginal, woebegone souls who work in theme parks or other low-rent entertainment centers. Fed up with the bogus diversions they sell, they yearn for more power and personal space. But their efforts to break free lead to even more claustrophobic dead ends.
This gives the book as a whole a monotonous rhythm, which Saunders nearly succeeds in hiding under the outlandish fantasies he concocts. Each story ends on a note of comic frustration that makes the reader anxious to push on to the next one, in hopes that things will work out for the protagonist there. The least successful pieces propose self-transcendence as an answer and wind up being sentimental. The best ones simply kick back and watch the world go to hell -- a process Saunders describes in the flat, matter-of-fact tone of a jaded tour guide.
All the stories are narrated in the first person, and most of the narrators speak in the present tense as though describing frustrating modes of existence which they expect will grind on forever. Here's Jeffrey, the hero of "The 400-Pound CEO," recounting the dreary power nexus at the "humane" raccoon-exterminating company that he hates too much to leave:
Claude comes in all dirty from the burial and sees me snacking and feels compelled to point out that even my sub-rolls have sub-rolls. He's right but still it isn't nice to say. Tim asks did Claude make that observation after having wild sex with me all night. That's a comment I'm not fond of. But Tim's the boss. His T-shirt says: I HOLD YOUR PURSE STRINGS IN MY HOT LITTLE HAND.
Mary, the 92-year-old cleaning lady at a science museum in "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror," is another unhappily employed time-server. She has to Windex the window in the living "see-through" cow's stomach. So far she's rat-poisoned a half-dozen Holsteins -- not out of compassion for them, but because she wants to tick off her boss.
The nameless narrator of the title story has just been made Special Assistant at a rundown Civil War theme park and must deal with a crazed security guard who likes to amputate shoplifters' hands. Park management decides to bury the evidence. But the ghost of one of the security guard's victims tells the Assistant that payback is on the way.
Saunders has a sure sense of the mean things that people do when they think nobody's watching -- or cares. And he knows how to add the perfect, grotesque detail, as with the 12-year-old ghost in "The Wavemaker Falters," who haunts the amusement park where he was killed on one of the rides and looks "scariest when he does real kid things, like picking his nose and wiping it on the side of his sneaker." The author lays on the degradation with a playful hand, however. Just when a character seems about to implode with inertia and self-loathing, the stunted heart rebels and the beleaguered person says, Enough: this is as low as I go.
In "Isabelle," a young ghetto boy gets inspired by "the first great act of love I ever witnessed" when he peeks into the living room of a ruthless neighborhood cop and sees the man tenderly bathing his paralyzed daughter on the couch. After the cop dies and the daughter's sent to the state hospital, the boy realizes that he must perform a totally selfless act of kindness to avoid a lifetime of sterile bitterness.
The funniest story in the book, "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz," tells of a guilt-ridden widower who supports an elderly woman friend named Mrs. Schwartz with the meager earnings from his failing interactive holography shop -- a sleazy establishment where customers plug their minds into the shop's computer so they can experience virtual-reality adventures like "Sexy Nurses Scrub You Down" and "Legendary American Killers Stalk You." One night, the widower accidentally throws the process into reverse and discovers that he can harvest his older customers' memories and sell the most interesting ones to history buffs for big bucks.
Several of Saunders's stories first appeared in the New Yorker and Story. Read together, they're like fitful, half-formed dreams that accompany a high fever and make you giggle in your sleep and then wake up feeling raw-edged and jittery. Thematically, they're an effective lead-in to CivilWarLand's main work, the novella Bounty, the capstone nightmare in Saunders's queasy dreamscape.
Bounty takes place in a strife-torn, futuristic America. Unlike classic dystopian tales of all-powerful totalitarian regimes -- Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale -- Saunders's dystopia concerns the collapse of big government. Bounty begins with national elections taking place amid poll riots and lynchings. America is polluted coast to coast. Society is divided between the Flaweds (people with genetic defects) and the Normals (people who have yet to be affected by the universally contaminated environment).
Contemporary allusions worked into Bounty include the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Maoist China's forced-resettlement policies, Love Canal, AIDS, and the privatization of government functions. Now that the 13th Amendment has been revoked, genetically flawed folks like Cole (he has claw feet) and his sister Connie (she has a vestigial tail) can be kidnapped by enterprising slavers. When Connie is sold to a businessman from Taos, Cole leaves his secure job at an East Coast theme-park brothel -- a zany amalgamation of Plimoth Plantation and Medieval Manor -- and heads west to find his sister. His route, first explored during the Great Depression by Saul Bellow's Augie March, takes him through a savage landscape:
For hours we head west, through Sandusky, Port Clinton, then Toledo, where in a public park militiamen hold back the dispossessed with firearms while emptying Hefty bags of bread crusts into a fountain for public consumption. We pass through Angola and Elkhart, through fields of torched corn, then Chicago, racked with plague, where corpses are piled high in vacant lots beside the tracks and Comiskey is now an open-air penitentiary, then across the plains, where solitary people dressed in sacks wander across the horizon, reminding me of my own cursed family. Sweet-smelling dust fills the car. The nation goes on forever. I never knew. When old people said plenty, bounty, lush harvest, I put it down to senile nostalgia. But here are miles and miles of fields and homes. Nice homes. Once it was one family per. Once fields were thick with food. Now city men assigned residence by the government sit smoking in the yards as we pass, looking out with hate on the domain of hayseeds, and the land lies fallow.
After several brutal interludes spent working as an "Involuntary Labor Associate" (a slave), a "Personal Pleasure Associate" (a whore), and a rebel fighter in the Flawed underground (run by an adventurous Normal with a big trust fund), Cole finally stumbles into Taos. It turns out that his odyssey is far from over. At the close of Bounty, we leave our hero approaching the headquarters of Flawed resistance fighters. A door swings open, and the book ends as Cole and the reader face the blank page of the future.
