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| The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Riverhead Books; 257 pages; $14 |
Twenty years ago, in that distant past we now call the mid-’90s, the American literati beatified George Saunders as their hallowed saint of short story writing--a torch passed from Cheever to Carver to Saunders. Often associated with the McSweeney’s generation, Saunders solidified his rank among the upper-echelons of literary fame--along with other notables, namely David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, & Junot Diaz--declared by The New Yorker’s 20 Best Writers Under 40 issue. By the turn of the century, Saunders had published the critically acclaimed CivilWarLand in Bad Decline & snagged a few minor writerly awards along the way. Since then, in the last fifteen years, the New York darling has written at least three novellas, three widely popular short story collections, one book of essays, and a smattering of nonfiction, in addition to garnering, among other prizes, the highly coveted MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2006.
The Braindead Megaphone is Saunders’s first and, so far, only collection of non-fiction. The pieces range from critique on the news media and Bush-era foreign policy--which comes off prescient while yet in many ways sounding a smidgen dated & naive--to small pieces praising Twain’s Huck Finn, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Barthelme’s “The School”, and a reminiscent tale of his early foray with reading instigated by a kindly nun. Other pieces include a GQ travelogue to Dubai for an assessment of “The New Mecca” to see if the metropolis is all that it has been trumped up to be; a visit to the US-Mexican border to investigate the ostensible “migrant threat” from the vantage point of some militarized podunk yokels; and a trip to Nepal in hopes of encountering a “miracle-boy” rumored to have been “meditating for the past seven months without food or water”. Interspersed throughout the collection are what, for lack of a better phrase, might be called cohesive threads--short essays that reflect on human dignity, unity, and pacifism.
Inspired by Barthelme, Saunders’s writing blurs the boundaries between what is authentic and what is audacious, between what is sincere and what is speculative, between what should be taken seriously and what is comical, between what constitutes essay and what characterizes fantasy. Perhaps this habit of incorporating humor into Terrible Events is best expressed by the essay “Mr. Vonnegut In Sumatra”. In it Saunders muses over the literary idealism of his younger years, of his admiration for the “somber, wounded, masterly presence” of a writer like Hemingway--referred to quaintly as Hem--and the contrasting “loose, episodic” kind consciousness of Vonnegut. In this way, Saunders points to Vonnegut as a pivotal inspiration for his own tragicomic style. As one reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle put it:
“Saunders has been honing a seemingly paradoxical style, one that uses the tools and tropes of satire to produce not broad slapstick but miniatures of often-devastating emotional potency. Absurdities and surrealities abound, yet no matter how bizarre their circumstances, the characters are convincingly drawn, with inner lives and voices that ring true”.
Such observations aren’t uncommonly made about Saunders and resonate with this reviewer. Saunders has a way of applying an uncanny element to his roving observations. Things that might, under any other lens, appear ordinary become a little less so and things that might naturally go by unnoticed get a second-life when viewed through eyes that see the world slightly askance.
For many readers, reviewers, and critics, Saunders’s greatest strength resides in his voice--as if he tore a page from the persona playbook of someone like Robert Frost. Instead of coming off as some Ivy League snoot, a member of the entitled elite who can’t fathom breathing the acrid air of the masses, Saunders dons a quasi-bumpkin tone as he relates his stories. Case in point, “A Brief Study of the British” hopscotches between high and low culture to lampoon the national caricature we mockingly call ‘Murica. In what borderlines cloddish, Saunders writes:
“To get to Britain, you fly over several oceans, including the Atlantic. I think also Missouri? I did not see very much of the Atlantic or Missouri or whatever because, as we passed over, I was watching a movie on our airplane called Dumb and Dumber. It was funny. It is about these two guys who are dumb.”
We laugh at the absurdity of it all while cringing ever-so-slightly at the possibility of such a schmuck existing, even sitting next to us on the next flight into Heathrow Airport. The entire piece remains steadily in this vein of megaphonic braindeadedness. Even in pieces like “Nostalgia” where Saunders reflects on getting older and his heightened prudishness, it’s obvious that he isn’t being entirely authentic about the perceived nostalgia of Then and Now. This too is an exaggerated parody of some dullard who could say,
“Women could get pregnant from merely watching a kiss in a movie! Girls--or at least the ‘good girls’--would go to the movies blindfolded. I remember once, in fourth grade, I had to get engaged to a girl whose coat I’d brushed up against in the cloakroom. Those were simpler times, but, in some ways, I think, better times.”
There’s a little bit of truth and a whole lot of snark thrown in for flare. As Will Blythe puts it in The New York Times,
The Willful Innocence that mars several of the political pieces might have been predicted from Saunders’s often brilliant short stories, which generally feature hapless, good-hearted yobs as protagonists. He uses what I’ll call the Apparent Doofus Technique, whereby an author invents a seemingly innocent character who will become illuminated in the course of the action and come to Greater Moral Understanding.
Such an assessment rightly puts the finger on a handicap of Saunders’s nonfiction. While it might effectively disarm the reservations of, say, a conservative reader, it seems unlikely that many of that persuasion would pick up Saunders’s work in the first place. It’s tough to imagine, for example, that the Texas Minutemen, profiled in “The Great Divider” would be inclined to pick up The Braindead Megaphone and read it between sips of Budweiser only to realize the absurdity of their gun-toting midnight stakeouts for “illegals”. But then again, maybe that’s the same “failure of imagination” Saunders suggests impairs our ability to deeply empathize with people who think differently than we do.
“Ask The Optimist” is the funniest piece in the collection. Unsurprisingly, it is the most emblematic of his recent work in the celebrated, Tenth of December. Stylized after classic advice columns like ‘Dear Abby’, “Ask The Optimist” reads like a Barthelme and Mel Brooks collaboration. By interweaving the metafictional Optimist into the story and pulling down the guise of a seemingly unassailable OZ, Saunders elevates the rising action in the piece like “The School”--but not quite as superbly. Regardless, it's bound to make even the solemnest of readers snicker.
For Saunders, most of his humor pivots on this narratorial unreliability and the subversion of traditional expectations. Or, as he puts it, "Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to." This humor, it would seem, epitomizes Saunders attempt at verity--a kindhearted, unpatronizing parental figure speaking to the masses. And if Saunders is anything, even in his caustic younger-years, he's kind, generous, considerate, and one hell of a writer.
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New York Times “American Male Opinionated Chatterbox” by Will Blythe
The Guardian “Careful With Those Metaphors, George” by Stephanie Merritt
A.V. Club “Review” by Noel Murray
SF Chronicle “Review” by Jason Roberts
Open Culture has compiled ten Saunders stories--mostly from The New Yorker Archives
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