Biography

The son of George Robert and Joan Saunders, George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958 and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. His father owned a restaurant where Saunders worked as a delivery boy. After the restaurant was lost in a fire, his father became a salesman, selling coal to apartment buildings. A natural raconteur, Saunders’s father helped to instill a love of storytelling and books in his son, giving him works by Machiavelli and Upton Sinclair. Saunders also traces his love of reading to the third grade, when Sister Lynette, a Catholic nun at St. Damian School, introduced him to Esther Forbes’s 1944 children’s novel of the American Revolution, Johnny Tremain. Saunders recalls this formative literary experience in the essay, “Thank You, Esther Forbes,” in The Braindead Megaphone.

Saunders attended the Colorado School of Mines and graduated with a degree in geophysical engineering in 1981. After graduation, he worked in oil fields in Sumatra, Indonesia. The work schedule alternated between four weeks on and two weeks off, and Saunders filled his time off by reading voraciously and traveling, an experience he reflects on in The Braindead Megaphone essay, “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra.” After returning from Sumatra, Saunders worked a number of odd jobs, including doorman in Beverly Hills, roofer in Chicago, convenience store clerk, and “knuckle puller” in a Texas slaughterhouse.

Saunders next studied in Syracuse University’s MFA program, working with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger, and graduated with an MA degree in 1988. He married another student in the program, Paula Redick. A daughter, Caitlin, was born in 1988, and a second daughter, Alena, was born in 1990.

In order to support his growing family, Saunders worked from 1989 to 1995 as a technical writer at Radian International and later at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. During this time, he continued to hone his fictional craft and submitted stories for publication. In 1992, The New Yorker published his story “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.” It was to be the first of many pieces that would appear in that magazine.

Since 1996, Saunders has taught at Syracuse University, where he has been awarded for his teaching while winning international recognition for his fiction. His first short fiction collection, Civil War Land in Bad Decline, was published in 1996. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist. In 1999, The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. In 2000, Saunders published his second collection, Pastoralia, whose stories were previously published in The New Yorker. Pastoralia helped to solidify his growing reputation as a short fiction writer. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won an O. Henry Award. In 2000, Saunders published a fairy tale, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, with illustrations by Lane Smith. This book won the Zilveren Griffel Children’s Book Award in the Netherlands and the Andersen Prize Children’s Book Award in Italy.

In 2005, Saunders published a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a dystopian fantasy that reflects the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, he received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. That year also saw the publication of a third story collection, In Persuasion Nation, a finalist for the 2006 Story Prize. In 2007, Saunders published a collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, some of which derive from assignments for GQ magazine that took him to places such as Africa, Nepal, the Mexican border, and Dubai. In 2009, Saunders received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The publication of a fourth collection of stories, Tenth of December, brought Saunders a new level of critical acclaim and public recognition. A cover story in the New York Times Magazine proclaimed, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year” (6 Jan. 2013). Later that year, he received the PEN/Malamud Award for his body of work in short fiction, and in 2014, he received The Folio Prize and The Story Prize, both for Tenth of December.

In 2014, Saunders’s convocation address at Syracuse University was published as Congratulations, by the Way. The speech emphasizes the importance of kindness and other concepts that reflect his practice as a Buddhist. Saunders is expected to publish Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017, his first full-length novel, which is to be set during the American Civil War and revolves around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie.

Analysis

George Saunders has established himself as a major voice in contemporary American fiction and is recognized as a master of the short story form. Influences on his satirical approach include writers such as George Orwell, Mark Twain, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, and Nikolai Gogol, but Saunders has developed a distinctive style of his own. This style has several components, but one of its defining characteristics is the way in which Saunders parodies and satirizes contemporary speech and writing, especially self-help discourse, the language of popular psychology, and euphemistic managerial, mass media, and corporate discourse. Saunders registers the humorous and often sad results when his characters internalize these languages, incorporate them into their conventional patterns of thought, and try, usually unsuccessfully, to understand themselves and the world through them.

This approach to language is a major source of humor in Saunders’s stories, but it is only one part of his larger use of comedy as a representational strategy. Saunders often uses humor to reflect the grim realities of American life. In “Sea Oak,” the aunt of a working-class family is literally scared to death when the family’s apartment is burglarized. In grimly comedic fashion, the aunt returns to her family as a zombie in order to satisfy the libidinal impulses that she repressed during her sad life and to coach her nieces and nephew on ways of avoiding similarly tragic ends through upward class mobility. Saunders treats the situation comically, but the humor has a critical edge: readers understand that the family’s class position has put it in a dire situation.

Saunders often focuses on family. In an interview, Saunders has located the experience of parenthood at the center of his moral vision: “when our daughters were born, everything seemed critical and important again. There was this sort of morality of extrapolation at work: I love this baby, everyone was once a baby, therefore everyone was once loved like this, therefore everyone matters” (Columbia, Spring/Summer 2001, 95). His characters are often embedded in difficult family circumstances, caught between their deep love for children, parents, or spouses and extreme economic stress and hardship.

Saunders’s commitment to the family often extends to social class as a unit, where the question of solidarity is often raised, and the limits of class interests are put to the test. Saunders is committed to representing the lived experience of social class in the US, especially working-class labor and life. During the current era of extreme American inequality, Saunders has focused on the experiences and fates of capitalism’s “losers.” For instance, as the narrator of “Christmas” watches a fellow roofer named John gamble away his paycheck and Christmas bonus to their supervisor, Rick, the narrator reflects: “A light went on in my head, and has stayed on ever since: It was all about capital. Rick could lose and lose and never really lose. Once John dipped below four hundred, he was dead. He was dead now” (“Christmas,” In Persuasion Nation, 95).

Saunders, who worked temporarily as a roofer, has kept this same light on in his head, and he has used it to illuminate American economic determinism, class stratification, and class immobility with a persistence and imagination seldom matched by his contemporaries. As he told an interviewer, “my experience of life has been political, in the sense that the most intense humiliations and difficulties I’ve experienced have always had to do with jobs and a lack of resources, and with what seems to me a sort of cultural blindness around these issues. So when I try to write my way towards emotional vividness, I gravitate towards these things” (Columbia, Spring/Summer 2001, 88). Saunders uses his unconventional fiction to make the often-invisible working class more visible.

Saunders not only registers the shift in America from a production to a service economy, but also the concomitant changes to the American landscape, long fantasized about in pastoral terms, but increasingly commodified and homogenized through development and defined by its repeatable corporate landmarks. More recently, Saunders’s work has evolved to consider international inequality and human rights on a more global scale.

Although Saunders often situates his characters in absurd predicaments or extreme circumstances, they remain rooted in a realistic sense of lived experience within those conditions. The same is true when Saunders incorporates fantastical elements into his stories, such as characters returning from the dead or depictions of the afterlife. In an essay, Saunders compares a story to a black box that the reader enters in one state and exits in another: “The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’—he can put what he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit” (“Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,” The Braindead Megaphone, 78). The absurd circumstances and fantastical departures in his fiction show that Saunders is happy to eschew realism in order to achieve this wider goal of affecting readers. While the emotional effect of Saunders’s stories often relies on his use of the fantastic, the point is always to shockingly and persuasively reflect the realities of the world from an unexpected angle.

This is also the case when Saunders creates dystopian settings. His dystopias are often placed in a recognizably near future, and they almost always remain tinged with plausibility, keeping them rooted to the here and now. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” a convicted felon submits to cruel, mood-altering medical experiments as a voluntary alternative to prison. The result is an image of our own world, with just a nudge or two in the direction toward which it may already be tilting. Even the more fantastical dystopian tale, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, maintains obvious allegorical connections to the national mood after September Eleventh and to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saunders explores questions of ethical action and behavior in his stories, often through the tension between empathy and kindness versus selfishness and self-interest. His characters sometimes make personal sacrifices in order to pursue ethical action on behalf of others. This is the case for the narrators of “Sea Oak,” and “Escape from Spiderhead.” At other times, his characters convince themselves that they are acting ethically while actually pursuing selfish and, consequently, self-destructive actions. This is arguably the case for the narrators of “Pastoralia” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” And sometimes the characters see the ethical path but lack the courage or strength to pursue it, like the narrator of “Christmas.” Along with his focus on class and contemporary speech and writing, Saunders’s ethical inquiries help to distinguish his wildly inventive fiction.

“Pastoralia” was an O. Henry Award Prize Story in 2001. The story is set in a historical theme park over approximately a two-week period. The unnamed narrator works as a caveman in one of the park’s exhibitions with a partner, Janet. Their job is to skin, cook, and eat a goat that is left for them each morning, and to simulate other caveman behaviors. They are forbidden to speak English or to break character in any way while in the cave where they live. They communicate with the outside world via fax machine.

At the story’s start it has been thirteen days since any visitors have poked their head into their exhibit, a sign that the theme park is in decline. Both characters desperately need to keep their jobs for financial reasons. Janet has a terminally-ill mother to support and a son in drug rehab, and the narrator supports a wife and three children, one of whom suffers from an unidentified and very worrisome swelling and stiffness of his limbs.

Janet not only speaks English in the cave, but she also smokes cigarettes, does crossword puzzles, and has a generally negligent attitude toward her job. Nonetheless, on the Daily Partner Performance Evaluation Form that the narrator must fill out, he declines to report any problems with Janet’s attitude, rates her performance very good, and says that no issues require mediation. Meanwhile, they have stopped receiving their daily goat and must resort to eating emergency crackers. Occasional memos from management use doublespeak to quell rumors about layoffs while simultaneously threatening to layoff those who do not work hard enough.

The two pressures of Janet’s poor work performance and the new austerity at the struggling theme park come to a head when park manager, Greg Nordstrom, takes the narrator to brunch and pumps him for information about Janet’s performance. He is looking for any pretext to fire her. When the narrator refuses to give him one, Nordstrom accuses him of lying on his form, a violation of the contract he has signed. The narrator warns Janet that her job is at risk, and for a few days, she is a model cavewoman.

Then two events intensify the pressure on the narrator and Janet. First, Janet’s son, Bradley, shows up at the cave. He has been kicked out of rehab for stealing a television and selling it for drug money. He will not leave until the narrator gives him twenty dollars. Second, the narrator receives a fax from Louise, his wife, telling him that the swelling of their son Nelson’s limbs has worsened, the cost of his medication has gone up, and the house is falling apart. Nelson has been asking, “Why is Dad never here?” A subsequent fax from Louise reports that Nelson is now completely paralyzed and that they are running out of money.

Taking a “sick day” because of the news that Bradley has been arrested for drugs and that her mother’s condition has worsened, Janet does not leave her Separate Area the next day. She gets drunk and shows the narrator pictures of Bradley as child. The narrator thinks of his father, who often had to cover for his coworker at a slaughterhouse. When his father died, the coworker sent the narrator’s mother a check for a thousand dollars as thanks. In spite of Janet’s egregious infractions, the narrator fills out a positive performance review for her.

A couple of days later, Janet gets the news that Bradley has been sentenced to ten years in prison. Just then, a visiting family shows up to observe them, and Janet argues aggressively with the father about parenting. She receives a negative evaluation from the visitors, and this time, in spite of Janet’s pleas, the narrator refuses to cover up her behavior. Janet is fired and the narrator is rewarded with extra food and drink. The story ends with the introduction of Linda, Janet’s replacement. Linda is incredibly serious about her work and has even permanently altered her brow to make herself look more like a cavewoman. As the narrator tries to keep up with Linda’s stony-faced simulation, he hears a fax coming in, probably from Louise about Nelson. With Janet, he could have read the message immediately; now he must wait for five terrible hours. It is clear that as a result of his report about Janet, he now finds himself in Janet’s old position in the cave.

A sub-plot concerns Marty, who runs the concessions for park employees, and his son, who together discuss the son’s attempt to fit in at an expensive boarding school. Marty tells the son that he doesn’t have to be rich to be nice, while the son replies that being rich really does seem to help. This exchange reflects on the narrator’s own attempts to be nice to Janet, as well as the limits of this niceness when the exigencies of his finances and family become too pressing to ignore. “Pastoralia” is thus about class solidarity and its limits. It charts a shift in American working-class labor from the production economy of the narrator’s father’s time to the service economy, which Saunders associates with performance and simulation, as well as dehumanization and regression, as embodied in the caveman role. Workers are seen as replaceable cogs, yet class is explored through the lived experience of financial pressures and through the ethical dilemmas that issue from personal and work relationships.

“CommComm” won the 2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. The events of the story take place during three days in October or November. The unnamed narrator works in the Community Communications office of an Air Force base. He establishes himself right from the start as a master of positively spinning the truth. When a number of beavers near the Air Force base are poisoned, the narrator uses a practiced rhetorical technique of “admitting,” “conceding,” “explaining,” and “pledging” in order to defuse the situation with the public and the press.

Although he longs for a wife and children, he returns to his lonely home, where he microwaves dinner for himself while his parents argue. It quickly becomes clear that his parents are, in fact, ghosts, and they marvel that they are never hungry anymore and that they cannot leave the house. With incomprehension, the parents reenact over and over the violent home invasion in which two burglars shot and killed them. They do not understand that they are dead.

The next day at the base, a particularly bad odor in the office draws the attention of Elliot Giff from the Safety Department. While Giff tries to investigate the smell, he is antagonized by another worker, Rimney, who provokes and insults him. Giff is a member of ChristLife Reënactors and insistently proselytizes to Rimney and the narrator. Giff tells Rimney that he prays for him and his wife, who has been disabled by a stroke. Rimney has disliked Giff ever since he suggested that his wife would be cured if Rimney prayed more.

The base is going to be shuttered, and all the workers have been offered a transfer to Omaha. However, a proposed branch of Homeland Security, the Dirksen Center for Terror, offers employment hope for those who wish to stay in town. This includes the narrator, who does not want to leave his parents. Not only can his parents not leave the house, but they also become agitated when he is gone for too long. Rimney has already been guaranteed a job at Dirksen, but everyone else on the base is anxious about the future.

Later that day, Rimney reveals the source of the odor to the narrator: two mummified bodies that Rimney has enclosed in bubble wrap and stored in an office closet. The bodies have been exhumed on the Dirksen excavation site, but if they were discovered to be “Potentially Historical” it would jeopardize the Dirksen project and all future jobs there. Rimney suggests that he could secure a position at Dirksen for the narrator if he agrees to help Rimney hide the bodies. The narrator thinks of his sister, who died at eight and never realized her wish to see Disneyland, and of his parents, who suffered after her death and then were murdered. He rationalizes helping Rimney to conceal the bodies by seeing his potential job at Dirksen as a well-deserved bit of luck for his parents. They bury the bodies in the forest on base, and the guilty narrator says a prayer over the makeshift graves.

The next morning, Giff brings a human hand to the office that has been found on site, suspicious that it had been the source of yesterday’s odor. Later Giff discovers the buried bodies and plans to call Historical the next day. Rimney admits to Giff that he and the narrator have buried the bodies and asks for his complicity. Giff, however, believes that the narrator and Rimney need redemption for their sinful action. He compares it to his own discovery that his son was fathered by another man, and how his angry response, in the form of compulsive pinching of his wife, continued until he prayed and God changed his heart. Rimney threatens Giff, while the narrator gets called away by a coworker.

Later that night Rimney arrives unexpectedly at the narrator’s home. In the back of his van, he reveals the body of Giff, whom he has killed with a rock. When the narrator refuses to help Rimney dispose of Giff’s body, Rimney attacks him with the same rock. The narrator is able to retreat into his house, where he encounters not only the ghosts of his parents, but the ghost of Giff as well. Giff realizes that the narrator’s parents do not know that they are dead, and the narrator admits that he has avoided telling them the truth in order to have some extra time with them. Giff persuades the narrator that if he loves his parents he should tell them the truth, lest they become trapped in the house forever, reenacting their deaths to the point of insanity. Giff then says he regrets forcing his religious views on everybody and pinching his wife. He also knows that Rimney has forged a note from Giff to his wife telling her that he is leaving her, but Giff has used his one allotted post-death “visitation” to visit the narrator.

Rimney breaks into the house and kills the narrator. He and Giff float above the neighborhood until they come to Giff’s house. The narrator now reciprocates by visiting Giff’s wife, Cyndi, and telling her the truth about the forged note. Visiting the narrator, Giff saved not only the narrator, but his mother and father as well. Visiting Cyndi, the narrator saves Giff. The narrator realizes that he had lived his life the wrong way, yet he had something in him that craved the light and ultimately saved him.

In “CommComm,” Saunders uses the narrator’s self-centered “cost-benefit” approach to decisions and actions in order to illuminate the limitations of self-interest. The narrator excels at his job, which consists of representing everything in positive terms for the military’s benefit. This skill extends to his personal life, in which he possessively keeps the ghosts of his parents in the house by concealing the truth of their deaths from them. He becomes complicit with Rimney because he is motivated by the Dirksen job. “CommComm” tests the limits of selfish action by representing a fantastical afterlife that makes the scale of self-interest seem meager.

“The Semplica Girl Diaries” is told through a series of diary entries written by an unnamed narrator with three children, Lily, Thomas, and Eva, and a wife, Pam. The entries are each headed with a date, and the story takes place between September 3 and October 8 of an unspecified year in the near future. The narrator begins his diary on the occasion of his fortieth birthday and rather ambitiously intends for it to stand as a record for future readers of what life was really like in his time. The diary is written in an informal style, often eliding pronouns and verbs and using symbols such as + and = to replace words. This creates an effect that is at once comical and also helps to characterize the narrator’s doting and often impractical pattern of thought.

Despite vowing to write in his diary every night, the second entry reveals that the narrator has already missed a day. In short, life has intervened. Specifically, the bumper of his car embarrassingly fell off when he was picking his children up from school, and a large rodent has died in their garage. We learn that many practical things need to get done, including balancing the checkbook, inspecting the car, replacing its bumper, cleaning the garage, and cleaning the basement, which recently flooded and is still full of water. The narrator realizes that he hardly has the leisure to reflect on the meaning of life in the way he originally intended in the diary.

The next entry records the depressing experience of accompanying Lily, the oldest daughter, to a birthday party at the house of her peer, Leslie Torrini. The Torrinis are wealthy, as evidenced by their thirty-acre property with multiple outbuildings, Ferraris and Porsches, and a trout stream crossed by an ancient Chinese bridge. Lily is particularly impressed by the large “SG” arrangement on the lawn. We do not learn what an SG is at this point, but Lily is anxious to get a closer look, while youngest daughter, Eva, keeps a cautious distance.

We slowly come to understand that SG stands for Semplica Girls. These are young women in impoverished circumstances from poor countries around the world. With the promise of improving their families’ circumstances, Semplica Girls submit to being strung together with a “microline” that passes through their brains (a process invented by a doctor named Lawrence Semplica) and then mounted on racks on the lawns of wealthy people, to serve as a form of synchronized lawn ornament. Semplica Girls thus represent a form of immigrant labor that is particularly instrumentalizing and inhumane.

Eva is clearly disturbed by her experience with the Semplica Girls. However, the narrator is only interested in trying to please Lily, whom he feels guilty about not being able to provide for in the same manner as wealthy parents can for their children. When Lily asks for porcelain figurines for her birthday, which she has seen in a catalog, the narrator realizes that they cannot afford them. The narrator and Pam are caught between, on the one hand, their finances, which keep them just out of poverty, and, on the other hand, their love for the children, whom they feel guilty about not being able to give all they desire.

When the narrator wins ten thousand dollars on a scratch-off lottery ticket, he is ecstatic. He and Pam make the loving but, given their financial circumstances, reckless decision to landscape their yard with Semplica Girls for Lily’s birthday. The narrator is unconcerned about the ethics of using Semplica Girls and only thinks about how happy they will make Lily. Lily cries tears of joy. In fact, everything is starting to look up for the family and a new hopefulness seems to surround them. Yet Eva continues to be disturbed by the Semplica Girls, and the narrator’s rationalization that the young women volunteered for this service and that their use is widespread in wealthy neighborhoods fails to change her feelings.

The sudden death of a coworker prompts the narrator to reflect on the preciousness of life. He resolves to live life to the fullest, and he counsels his children to make every moment count; to live out their dreams; and, above all, to avoid being passive, which he sees as his own greatest mistake. However, this speech has the unintended effect of emboldening Eva to free the Semplica Girls from their yard. This brings a new level of danger to the family. Not only are they expected to compensate Greenway, the company that provided the Semplica Girls, for more than eight thousand dollars, putting their house at risk, but it is also a crime to release a Semplica Girl. An appeal for money to Pam’s father, a wealthy farmer called Farmer Rich, fails. He reproves them for squandering their windfall on something so frivolous, rather than putting it in a college fund or investing it.

The story ends with the arrival of a detective named Jerry who suspects that “activists” have freed the Semplica Girls. However, it seems only a matter of time before he uncovers the truth, which will have long-term consequences for Eva. The story ends with the narrator belatedly reflecting on the Semplica Girls. Where are they? What has their experience been like? What will become of them? But it is too late for these questions now. He makes a note to himself to call Greenway and have the ugly rack removed from the yard.

In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” Saunders continues to explore the theme of inequality in America through humor, verbal ingenuity, and empathy. However, this story sees his vision expanded to incorporate the condition of global poverty under international capitalism and globalization. The familiar situation in Saunders’s fiction of a family hovering just above financial disaster is thereby brought into a much larger sphere of concern that includes global inequality, economic migrancy, and human rights, significantly expanding Saunders’s vision of capital and social class.

Summary

George Saunders is one of America’s most inventive contemporary short fiction writers and most unique satirists and humorists. He combines a devilishly precise ear for contemporary habits of speech and thought with startlingly absurd, dystopian, and often fantastical visions of American life, all while insisting on the importance of empathy and ethical actions. Indeed, his narratives can themselves be understood as empathetic and ethical vehicles that aim to provoke readers to reexamine their assumptions about class, inequality, and self-interest in everyday American life. Although for his dehumanized characters, events often end tragically, or perhaps tragicomically, few writers can rival Saunders in the hopeful potential he locates in empathy and kindness.

Bibliography

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