Book Review Article, George Saunders, CIVILWARLAND in BAD DECLINE

Book Review Article

George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Random House paperback edition, 2016, 198 pp. Originally published in 1996.

Two Instances of Prevarication

(1)    On a Writer’s Acknowledgements Page

“I often marvel at the persona engendered by the influence of the form. The writer presents himself as one surrounded, cushioned, buoyed up by wonderful friends. He is, he says, ‘blessed,’ ‘in luck,’ ‘serene’ even in his obligations. Not a word on the acknowledgements page about grievances, or about offenses received and inflicted. Who would suspect a curmudgeon behind such handsome avowals? But perhaps this is what they are good for. By their virtue, ill-humor, rancor, resentments are temporarily purged, and the author is given a glimpse of the person he might have become, had he formed the habit of privately closing each day with such notations as are called for by the publishing of acknowledgements.”

Leo Steinberg

(2)    On Blurbery

Another spot replete with fakery is the back cover of any book, where the blurbers hold sway, trying to say only good things—often lying through their teeth about what they really think. Why lie? Because these guys are writing books themselves, and when the time comes they will need favors returned—i.e., more lying blurbs for the backs of their books. Here are some of the blurb-lies on the back cover of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—annotated by me, with rebuttals.

BLURB ONE:

“George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice.” Tobias Wolff

Well, Saunders went on to become a writer of arresting brilliance; he probably is the best living American short story writer today. But back when he published CivilWarLand—almost twenty-five years ago—he still had a long way to go. His “sure sense of his material” was far from sure. The narratives of this book are often deficient in structure, the author does not have a firm grasp on his narrator, and the writing can be ragged.

In 2012, sixteen years after this, his first book, was published, Saunders wrote an afterword for the paperback. Read that afterword closely and you will note that the writer himself is aware of the book’s faults. He tries to be kind to his former self. He resists admitting how shocked he probably was when he looked back at this, his first effort, from the high perch of Literary Glory to which he had attained. But interesting phrases slip into his afterword, ways of characterizing these stories: among others, “abrupt and telegraphic, truncated and halting.” The stories are, he writes, “more cruel, more misshapen then they need to be . . . the stories are mean in places . . . occasionally nasty.” He even suggests, at one point, obliquely, that the book is “a failed attempt.”

BLURB TWO:

“An astonishingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.” Thomas Pynchon

The voice may be astonishing, but it is not yet tuned. That will come later. “Just the kinds of stories we need to get us etc., etc.” sounds like a piece of meaningless rhetoric, a specialty among blurbers. Say something that sounds good, reads, at first glance, as profound, but really is totally vacuous. There is a certain kind of comic writer whose comedy, even when dark, uplifts us by the force of its art. Flannery O’Connor is such a writer. So is Raymond Carver, and so is Isaac Babel. In his afterword Saunders mentions each of these writers as models in great writing. He also notes that you must give up on imitating the greats and find your own unique way.

I think that in the year 2020, George Saunders has found his way and has become that kind of writer. But not with this, his first book, far from it. Firmly anchored in a deeper, profound reality, great comic writing redeems the flawed world, overshadows by the very force of its art the grim realities of life in flesh. But you get no sense of redemption from the sometimes funny, but overall terribly sad stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

BLURB THREE:

“Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.” Jonathan Franzen

Got some bad news for you and some bad news. Which do you want first? (That’s a quotation from one of the stories.) See the comment about the raggedness of narrative above (first bad news); see also the last part of this review, a discussion of the book’s stylistic quirks (second bad news). It took Saunders—as he admits in the afterword—“seven long years” to write the stories of CivilWarLand. Most of them have the same setting and the same identical narrator. Readers of the book in reviews on Amazon sometimes complain that he writes the same story over and over. Furthermore, in reading this collection one has no sense of effortlessness whatsoever. On the contrary. The narratives are often belabored.

d

Life in a Demented Theme Park

CivilWarLand depicts life in the U.S.A., and it certainly is in bad decline. The basic idea, repeated in most of these stories: we Americans are living not in a life, but in a huge, dystopian amusement park, where we fight to escape but remain wallowing in despair. The stories are set in some future time, but not far into the future. Something has happened. For the most part, we are given no backgrounding about what that something was. American life has, apparently, just wended its hapless way into dystopian catastrophe. An exception is made in Bounty—the longest story in the collection. Here we have brief background mention of “the first wave of mass death,” and “the Third Panic.” Women in Bounty are giving birth to babies with physical defects: claws instead of toes (e.g., the narrator), vestigial tails (his sister). These babies grow up to become a persecuted minority, oppressed, disparaged, sometimes pressed into slavery. They are known as the Flaweds. The underlying irony of the story, however, is that everyone—even the so-called Normals—is badly flawed, as is suggested by an old sage of a lady, who pokes her nose into the story for a one-page appearance.

The narrator, usually unnamed, is always a loser guy, downtrodden, well-meaning, lonely—he often has a wife, but they don’t get along and she gives him zero respect. He is always about to get fired from his job and worried that he will soon find himself in even deeper shit. His only recourse is to persevere: “I think of fleeing the city. I think of working on a shrimper, or setting myself on fire downtown. Instead I go to work” (“Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz”). Another motif: “I think of how lovely it all could have been had anything gone right” (“Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror,” which has, for a change, a female narrator). The narrator usually has a heart of gold, a rarity in his world teeming with degenerates and cynics. In two of the stories—“Isabelle” and “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz”—he ends up devoting himself to caring for the retarded or aged.

There is also usually the character of his boss, totally crass and cruel beyond all measure. Ancillary characters, almost always stupid, are often afflicted: one has Tourette’s syndrome, another has no arms, rings the doorbell with his face. One sentence in one story epitomizes the world described in this book: “What a degraded cosmos.” Or, to take another example, we’re all like “the legless man doing life, who’s perennially on toilet duty.”

Once in a while a character—such as the narrator of Bounty—looks back on what used to be a better life: “What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.” But by the time we get to the action of these stories all possibility for such a life is dead and gone. What, exactly, is Saunders satirizing in this book? Bad government, the excesses of gross capitalism? Well yes, but not only that. 

In CivilWarLand just about any institution or movement gets a poke in the snout: due-diligence business-speakers—Saunders is a master at bizspeak—do-gooders, New Agers, Feminists, everybody. Here, for example, is a description of the way modern parents bring up their children: “The bearded dad offers me sunflower seeds and briefs me on his child-rearing philosophy. Discipline and other forms of negativity are shunned. Bedtimes don’t exist. Face wiping is discouraged. At night the children charge around nude and screaming until they drop in their tracks, ostensibly feeling good about themselves” (Bounty).

The same story features, briefly, a cult group called Austerity, whose members are hairshirt-wearers of the modern age. One of them, “dressed as Death Eating Chips to protest the reemergence of wasteful packaging practices,” is a girl. Divested from her costume, she turns out to be a feminist: “In deference to Austerity’s policy of eschewing anything even vaguely degrading to women she’s shaved off her hair and plucked her eyebrows and is wearing a chest-flattening harness. Still her beauty shines through.”

The Christian religion remains a solace for some of the characters, but their belief, like everything else, is mere cause for mockery. Such are Lupe and Maria, the Ramirez twins in Bounty, who “rarely speak and when they do are either proselytizing or claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary hovering above a moat.” The moral message of almost all the tales in the book goes like this: “Don’t budge from here [from the demented theme park]. Learn to enjoy what little you have. Revel in the fact that your dignity hasn’t yet been stripped away. Every minute that you’re not in absolute misery you should be weeping with gratitude and thanking God at the top of your lungs” (Bounty again).

Meanwhile, the stars look down in gleaming contentment upon the Plight of Man: “In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal.” Once in a while we get a swerve out of the madcap zaniness of the narrative into something approaching pathos. This happens in the title story with the McKinnon ghost family. Mr. McKinnon, who fought in the actual Civil War, “starts talking about bloody wagon wheels and a boy he once saw sitting in a creek slapping the water with his own severed arm. He tells how the dead looked with rain on their faces and of hearing lunatic singing from all corners of the field of battle and of king-sized rodents gorging themselves on the entrails of his friends.” 

Okay, this passage still has overtones of the let’s-be-grossly-amused tone that dominates the whole book, but the rain on the faces and the lunatic singing establish a slight twinge of something else. The book needs more such passages.

The hyped-up narrator—who sometimes reminds you of these trolling kids on the Internet nowadays, who post “funny” messages to families who have just lost a bullied child to suicide—seldom removes his mask of never-ending-let-it-hang-out madcap. The title story ends with another swerve into a different mood. In a weird final paragraph the narrator describes himself being murdered by a degenerate named Sam:

“Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.”

What is different about Mr. McKinnon’s vision, and about this final paragraph, in comparison to most of the other narrative in this story, and in the whole book? The big difference is that in these two passages we escape, if only briefly, from the caustic narrator behind the narrative: the man with the nasty twinkle in his eye and the sardonic grin on his lips. And what, largely, is the difference between the George Saunders who wrote this first book and the accomplished writer who came later? The difference is, largely, that the accomplished writer has learned to rein in the excesses of that leering guy.

What a relief for the reader—so he thinks at first—when, in Bounty, the narrator finally escapes from the theme park. Thank God. Now at least we get something different. But, alas, if you are looking for relief from the incessant chaos and tumult of the book, good luck with that. As the narrator journeys west in search of his sister, he comes upon a chaotic U.S.A. that mirrors the chaos in the theme park he just left. Once in a while, in what appears an attempt to escape the utter hopelessness of the world of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, the author tacks on something like a happy ending. Here is the conclusion of “The 400-Pound CEO”:

“Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there’s a God above this subGod, who’s busy for a few Godminutes with something else, and will be right back, and when he gets back will take the subGod by the ear and say, ‘Now look. Look at that fat man. What did he ever do to you? Wasn’t he humble enough? Didn’t he endure enough abuse for a thousand men? Weren’t the simplest tasks hard? Didn’t you sense him craving attention? Were you unaware that his days unraveled as one long bad dream?’ And maybe as the subGod slinks away, the true God will sweep me up in his arms, saying: My sincere apologies, a mistake has been made. Accept a new birth, as token of my esteem.

“And I will emerge again from between the legs of my mother, a slighter and more beautiful baby, destined for a different life, in which I am masterful, sleek as a deer, a winner.”

Notwithstanding this optimistic coda to the story—a kind of deus ex machina in a minor key—no such merciful God ever shows up, not in “The 400-Pound CEO,” nor in any of the other tales. The merciless subGod—Beelzebub or his brother—remains in control of human fate. Although the author may not be aware of this, the subGod he refers to in the passage quoted above looks a lot like the sardonic guy who runs the action of the whole book, i.e., the teller of the stories in CivilWarLand. That grinning narrator is seldom challenged by a higher force, whose name may be George Saunders.

Once in a while the well-meaning good guy of an author takes a look at what his narrator is doing and doesn’t like it. Whereupon, he, the author, tries to rein in the subGod—by including passages such as the ending of “The 400-Pound CEO,” or by throwing in a kindly character once in a great while. But if you look at the book as a whole you cannot doubt that the subGod is largely in control. I find it amusing that George Saunders was puzzled and bemused by the reaction of one of his old neighbors from Chicago to this book—as related in the afterword:

“‘It worried me. I’m worried about you. You seem like a very unhappy person. Like the guy who takes out the garbage, late at night, miserable and grumbling . . . . That book is not like you. You were always such a happy little guy.’

“Wait a minute, I thought once she’d hung up: I’m happy. I’m one of the happiest people I know. My book is not unhappy. My book is funny. My book tells, uh, dark truths. I’m a hopeful person. Writing this book was a happy, hopeful act.”

There’s an old paradox about comic writers: out of the depths of melancholy comes zany, happy, crazy-funny fiction. The best example of this is Nikolai Gogol. Melancholic and bizarrely neurotic in his everyday life, Gogol produced fiction that has you rolling on the ground with laughter. So if that’s true, then maybe the reverse is also operative: a happy guy writes disturbing, unhappy fiction about a world wallowing in despair. “My book is funny.” Well, yes, sometimes it is—there are plenty of genuinely witty passages—but most of the time CivilWarLand is very, very sad. You want to experience a bad dream, read this book all the way through, cover to cover.

d

The Style of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.”

                                                                                                                  George Saunders

I’m not sure exactly what Saunders means in the above quotation, but I think he refers to the delicate nature of a short story. You can commit errors, stylistic solecisms in the body of your large novel, and they will appear less glaring than in a short narrative. A slight wrong turn in a short story, however, can spoil the broth for a good reader. The same goes for telling a joke: timing is everything, setting things up, pulling the listeners in with a wry grin, knowing exactly how to deliver the punchline. Isaac Babel knew all that, he who wrote and rewrote and polished and polished and polished, and finally ended up with a gem of a story only three pages long. The mature George Saunders who speaks of the “brutal land” of the short story knows that truth, while the George Saunders of CivilWarLand has not yet learned it. In his creative writing classes at Syracuse, he could assign this book as an example of how not to write short stories.

In this, his first book, the rudiments are already there. We can already find examples of the kind of writing that is to make George Saunders, in the year 2020, one of the best American masters of the short story. The comic imagination is already there. Take, for example, the store named O My God, which sells religious statuary. Or protestors who have protested so fervently that they have developed bony knuckles from perpetually walking around with their fists clenched. The book is rife with such hilarious detail, and simply teeming with wild, creative flights of the imagination. There are constant divagations from the main plot of a story, subplots or characters that flash into the febrile imagination of the writer and bloom for a sentence, or a paragraph.  

Here are a few examples, from Bounty: (1) One of the “Flawed” who entertains “Normals” at the theme park is Brian, who “had an eye in the back of his head and would read Chaucer from a book I held behind him. In truth his third eye was a nonfunctional glutinous mass and he’d memorized the passage.” (2) The camp doctor at the theme park is perpetually intoxicated, and that’s not particularly funny, but this is: “Once when I found him soused in a ditch he admitted to being confused by the difference between hemorrhoids and piles.” Pause, reader, for a moment and think about that sentence. I’m not sure that the narrator who rushes us through the action of Bounty is aware himself of its comic possibilities. A guy comes upon the drunk camp doctor in a ditch. How in the world did the ensuing conversation even get to the matter of piles? Two guys talking in a ditch, one of them drunk, and suddenly the subject is piles! That’s fun, folks, and that’s creative.

(3) The I-narrator works briefly as a barge puller on the Erie Canal, thinks of himself as a “surrogate mule,” and then wham—here comes a one-paragraph digression: “Mules are at a premium. Thousands have died of a bone marrow disease. The ones that lived lost the use of their legs. You’ll walk past a field and there’ll be fifteen or twenty of them lying on their sides braying. High-school kids get a kick out of pouring gas on them and lighting them up. It’s a craze. The animals rights people do their best to prop them back up and slap on feedbags and post anti-vandalism signs, but no sooner are they back at headquarters than the mules are either toppling over or burning.”

(4) One of the cult groups that the narrator encounters as he wanders America, the so-called Guilters, have established their Church of Appropriate Humility in an abandoned McDonald’s. “The ultimate Guilter ritual is when one of them goes into a frenzy and thrusts his or her hand into a deep fryer. A mangled hand is a badge of honor. All the elders have two, and need to be helped on and off with their coats. There was a rash a few years ago of face-thrusting, until the national Guilter Council ruled it vain and self-aggrandizing. Guilters believe in quantifying pain. Each pain unit is called a Victor, after their founder, Norm Victor. Each Victor earned is a step towards salvation. Having a loved one die tragically earns big Victors. Sometimes for a birthday present a wife will cheat on her husband with one of his friends in such a manner that the husband walks in and catches a painful eyeful. Once at the facility we got hold of a bootleg video of a group of cuckolded Guilter husbands talking about the difficulties of living with simultaneous rage and gratitude.”

(5) One more example, this time from “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.” An armless man takes a trip in virtual reality—the program is Youth Roams Kansas Hometown, 1932—back to his boyhood, where he waves his still-intact arms at long-dead friends and neighbors. “It’s all homemade bread and dirt roads and affable dogcatchers. What a sweet grin appears. He greets each hometowner with his ghost limbs and beams at the chirping of the holographic birds. He kneels awhile in Mrs. Lawler’s larder, sniffing spices that remind him of his mother elbow-deep in flour. He drifts out to the shaded yard and discusses Fascism with the iceman near some swaying wheat. His posture changes for the better. He laughs aloud. He’s young again and the thresher has yet to claim his arms.” Hey, look! This is another example of creeping pathos in a book where most things verging on pathos are quickly beaten back with mockery.  

All of the above examples amount to kernels of what could be developed into separate short stories. Was/is Saunders aware of this? Notwithstanding the author’s assertion—in the afterword—that it took him “seven long years” to write this book containing only seven stories, the reader’s impression is often that of a narrator in a frenzy, squandering his creativity, rushing through stories in a mad attempt to get the stuff told, while, above all, keeping things properly zany. The belabored narrator is often trying too hard. He has the orchestra assembled, but the conductor has lost control of it; the music is loud, and all too often the Three Stooges march into the picture, tooting off tune on tubas. Well, if you like the Three Stooges maybe that’s a good thing.

The creative writing instructors tell us, “Show, don’t tell.” Of course, like so many hard-and-fast maxims of the MFA racket, this one can sometimes be invalid. I once attended a writers’ workshop in Vermont. One writer-instructor who loved the above maxim had us read Chekhov’s “Lady with Dog” as an exemplary piece of fiction. The story is exemplary, but, as I informed the instructor, it is also rife with tell, not show.

At any rate, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is a frenzy of telling. Not exactly the kind of third person telling by an omniscient authorial presence. Saunders prefers first-person narrative, but his narrator does something similar to what that third-person teller does. Here’s a typical example from the first, title story: “As we walk up the trail he’s wearing a sweatsuit and smoking a cigar and I tell him I admire his acumen. I tell him some men are dreamers and others are doers. He asks which am I and I say let’s face it, I’m basically the guy who leads the dreamers up the trail to view the Canal Segment. He likes that. He says I have a good head on my shoulders. He touches my arm and says he’s hot to spend some reflective moments at the Canal because his great-grandfather was a barge guilder way back when who got killed by a donkey.” Etc.

This kind of indirect rendering of speech is not limited to any one story; it is used perpetually throughout the book. What about setting the scene and letting the characters speak? Try this:

Well, I admire your acumen (I said). After all, some men are dreamers and others are doers.

He cocked his left eye at me.

Which are you?

Me, I’m the guy who etc., etc.

Here is a scene describing how the narrator is beaten up: “Soon I’m downwind of the tent-town stink and can hear their domestic disputes and their brats screaming in bad grammar. I’m not ten feet from their barbed wire when a few young toughs recognize my khaki as corporate issue and wrangle me down to the ground while giving me a ribbing about health care benefits and the amount of time I’ve spent in conference rooms. I don’t fight back, etc.” All tell, no show. Indirect speech. Instead of letting his characters play out the scene, the narrator summarizes the whole thing in rapid-fire monologue.

I’m not saying using indirect speech is always wrong, but there’s something out of whack with the narration when you use it incessantly. I’m still puzzled over what exactly is the point of telling your story like this and what effect it has on the narrative as a whole. One thing it does for sure is speed up the action of the story. Pacing. This kind of summarizing instead of writing scenes makes everything go faster.

Take this paragraph, from “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz”: “The kids come out of it with a firsthand War Years experience and I come out of it with a check for five hundred dollars, enough to hire a temporary live-in for Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Which I gladly do. A lovely Eurasian named Wei, a student of astrophysics, who, as I’m leaving them alone for the first time, is brushing out Mrs. Ken Schwartz’s hair and humming, ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart.’” A lot of things happening here, over the course of a single paragraph, including the introduction of a new character, Wei, who struggles for purchase in the story, but hangs on only briefly. Such is the fate of many characters in CivilWarLand in Decline, people who hop out of the author’s fervid imagination into the narrative, but remain ancillary, undeveloped, and soon expire of desuetude.

The book is teeming with gratuitous characters. Even central personages are, largely, undeveloped. We could take much more seriously the narrator’s (in Bounty) desperate peregrinations across the U.S. in search of his beloved sister, were that sister not described in the same terms as so many other characters: dumb, puerile, cynical; in other words, had the narrator taken the time to develop the character, give her some humanity, make her appear at least a little bit worthy of love.

The feeling that the narrative force is in a hurry, eager to get the story told, is especially pronounced in Bounty. Billed as a novella, this is really one of the short theme-park stories, with a picaresque tacked on. All the action of the story involves the narrator’s breaking out of the theme park and traveling west, over Americana. But when he finally finds his sister we dispense with her, and dispense with the whole tale, in short order. Here’s what happens over the course of two pages: the narrator comes to the end of his journey and discovers his sister Connie. She’s pregnant. They exult. Then they have lunch. “Over soup he [Corbett, the bad guy who took his sister away but has now become a good guy] asks if I want a job in Grounds.” The narrator takes the job. “A week later she goes into labor in the rec room” and gives birth. The giving of birth, description and naming of the baby take all of one paragraph. Next, on the same page, the narrator hears about a rebel cell “down in Talpa,” apparently fighting for the rights of oppressed Flaweds. He kisses Connie and the baby goodbye, takes off, arrives at his destination—still on the same page—joins the rebel cell. End of story. Pacing. Bounty, and especially the way it ends, is a textbook example of narrative pacing run amuck.

Then there’s the matter of the humor. Just as the short story form itself is a delicate instrument, so too does the writing of comic fiction demand a delicate touch. Not-quite-right humor can spoil the narrative. Wild creative flights of the imagination—and Saunders specializes in such flights—can be very funny. See some of the examples I’ve cited above. But, then again, a high flyer can easily forget his sense of measure and fly too high and then suddenly come crashing down to earth. The Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino is such a pilot, one who puts together a good film and who might even excel—had he only a sense of measure.

Sometimes the narrator/narrators of CivilWarLand remind you of an over-eager, amateur stand-up comedian, straining for laughs. Want to be funny? Throw in a character—she’s a baby sitter in “The 400-Pound CEO”—and name her Mrs. Rasputin Har. Or do what Hollywood loves to do in comedy films: throw in some fart humor or have a child, a toddler, use an obscenity: “Now we’re on the fucking lam” (Bounty). Har. Describe how a family pet is murdered, roasted eaten: “Is it right that a couple of little kids should have to watch a grown overweight Italian man coldcock their father in order to bludgeon their dog to death with an eight-iron and roast it over an open fire?” Har, har, har.

Maybe best of all, make fun of a doddering oldster. One entire story indulges itself in this: “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror.” Here we have the only tale in the collection with a female narrator, and she is 92 years old. To a certain puerile mind—the same kind of mind that might appreciate the thing cited above, about killing and roasting the family pet—this in itself is already funny: ninety years old, Har! This story has some of the best examples of where failed humor can run a narrative off the tracks. It has cute children making obscene gestures. Over the course of a single page Mary tells of how great sex once was with her lover Herb, until her husband Bud and his gangster friends “slit his throat and dumped him off a barge into the CalSag. After killing Herb the lot of them came over to our place for dinner as usual. Oh I was beside myself. All of them had excellent appetites. Every Sunday they came. After eating they would take their shirts off and talk gangster strategy in the front room . . . invariably Bud would have me try on a dress for the group. The day he killed Herb he made me put on a cigarette-girl get-up,” etc. etc., etc.

At this point you can almost see the stand-up comedian sweating—there’s, say, some leering drunk, like me, out in the audience, making loud remarks. The desperate stand-upper now pushes the “humor” still further into zaniness. Mary describes her brother: “He was a Wobbly and went out West, where they cut off his penis [Ho, ho] and hung him from a bridge [Har]. And did you know they shipped him back without cleaning him up one bit and my poor mother had to view the body of her only son without its penis and with such a horrible rope burn on the neck?” [Yo-ho-ho, and if this were a film Tarantino would insert a scene with the puzzled mother unzipping the fly of a corpse in a coffin and peering hard at the absence of a penis].

Funny. In describing what is unfunny about “Downtrodden Mary,” I have made it sound funny. But that is indicative of my ability to write comic sentences. Believe me, while you’re reading that story it’s not funny at all. Aren’t yet ready to boo the comedian off the stage? Try this, Mary’s next gambit: “That is why I moved to the city and before long was married to a man with all gold teeth, who used them to bite painful arcs into my legs. Bud was brutal through and through” [Har, har, hardy-har, what a prize that Bud is, a biter, Ho-ho-ho]. And we could go on with this (it gets even worse), but I’ve had enough of laughing my guts out.

Don’t get me wrong. I object to such passages on aesthetic grounds, not because they are politically incorrect. Some gross descriptions even work for me. I like the mention of a man who keeps an actual shit list, “enhanced with an angry piece of feces stamping its feet.” That’s funny. Anyone versed in the dogma of politcorrect will hardly, however, make it past the first page of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. There should even be a warning on the title page: THIS BOOK IS NOT, WE REPEAT NOT, FOR THE POLITICALLY CORRECT. WARNING. STAY AWAY. KEEP OUT. THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU, ARDENT ADVOCATE OF SPEECH CONTROL AND THOUGHT CONTROL.

By the way, political correctness, in my view, should be shunned by any writer interested in producing quality literary fiction. Great women writers—such as Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West—would sneer derisively upon American woman writers who are legion these days, the kind who self-gag themselves, their speech, their thought, in the mistaken belief that a writer should obey the nicey-nice strictures of Feminism, and Ageism, and God knows how many other gruesome Isms there are out there.

Adumbrations

Anyway, you get my main point by now: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is far from a well-written book. Its fledgling author still has much to learn, about pacing, about the dangers of pushing humor to the point where it is overdone, and is, consequently, not funny anymore. About being too cynical, about too much telling—in a word—how to retain a sense of measure and how to structure a story. The good news is that by now George Saunders has learned all those things. And more. Take a look at his most recent short story collection, Tenth of December. The differences between that book and CivilWarLand are day and night. To take just one example, look at the teenage protagonists in the first story, “Victory Lap”: Alison Pope and Kyle Boot. They are more rounded, more developed; they are real human beings, sympathetic—much more so then any of the cardboard jokey characters manipulated by the leering narrator of the first collection. Or try Lincoln in the Bardo. Good stuff. Billed as a novel, it really is still a story, albeit a long one. Saunders does not write novels, probably having learned, from the structural mess of Bounty, to stay mostly away from lengthy narrative. With his first published book Saunders was still, obviously, a novice writer; talented, yes, but raw. Now he is a master.

Interesting adumbrations of the Saunders who is to come peek out occasionally from the pages of CivilWarLand. In addition to the McKinnon family, ghosts who show up in the title story, a dead child’s specter appears at the end of that tale. There are several other appearances of ghost characters, including a child, for whose death the narrator is responsible in “The Wavemaker Falters.” Deep in the mind of the author such characters are girding their loins, taking on ghostly narrative flesh, in preparation for Lincoln in the Bardo.

The title of George Saunders’ first book is weirdly prescient, the way he gets our Civil War into the picture. For, sad to say, we’re still fighting that war in the U.S.A. Lately, much apparently on the mind of Saunders is the present political situation of this country, our deep political division and the antics of our clown president. His most recent story in The New Yorker, “Love Letter”—April 6, 2020—utilizes one of his favorite tropes: it takes a look at a future time, but not far into the future, when “loyalists” have begun turning the country into a dictatorship. A passage from Bounty reads like another adumbration of what is to come:

“‘We need a gun,’ Mom said. ‘For if someone tries to take the house.’

‘The people who come to take the house,’ Dad said, ‘will have more guns than you can imagine.’

“And he was right. They had guns and riding crops and mortars. They had a sense of high moral purpose. They had the sanction of the provisional government and a portable sound system that blared ‘Homogeneity, Sweet Homogeneity,’ as they blockaded the home of any family with a Flawed member, meaning every family but the Quinces, who they blockaded for fraternizing with Flaweds.”

It takes but a slight skip ahead from that passage to reach the loyalists of “Love Letter.” But over the years since he published CivilWarLand in Bad Decline the writer George Saunders has taken a giant leap forward in his skillset as a writer. Most important of all, he has fired the over-zany, over-eager, over-doer, over-cynical narrator of his first book and hired a guy with a perfect touch in humor, and a feel for how a story should be structured, and facility in developing characters, and a sense of measure. A kind of solicitous God of the story, watching over its telling, in place of that Beelzebub. 

Book Review Article GEORGE SAUNDERS, TENTH OF DECEMBER

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE

George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House, 2013, 272pp.)

In a recent rant I wrote on the sad state of the contemporary American short story, I railed against what is sometimes known as ‘The New Yorker story,’ that all-too-common pedestrian thing called “domestic literary fiction.” Happily, there are always exceptions to egregious trends, and George Saunders, who is a contributor to The New Yorker, is a big one. Exception, that is.

How is his fiction different from the normal, run-of-the-mill domestic stuff—the kind of fiction I can’t stand? A good place to begin would be with a comparison between his Tenth of December and another book of short stories recently published, The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I picked up Nguyen’s book with high expectations, having read his novel, The Sympathizer, which has great writing, wonderful sentences on every page.

I found one good sentence in the whole of The Refugees, “his beautiful and heartrending new story collection” [Joyce Carol Oates editorial review in The New Yorker; beware, beware, o ye readers, the editorial review].  Here is the one good sentence: “Floating in his teacup on the patio table was a curled petal from a bougainvillea, shuttling back and forth.” Why would Nguyen, who is certainly capable of writing good, literary sentences, decide that such sentences are unnecessary in his short stories, that he can get away with the pedestrian and insipid style of The Refugees? 

Probably because his proximity to the great American boondoggle of the creative writing industry [he is Professor of English at the University of Southern California] has conditioned him to believe that stories need no stylistic verve or panache. “Just the humdrum, dreary facts, ma’am.” As for me, I believe that short story collections, like products in a grocery store, should have expiration dates. For me, The Refugees has already expired.

Not so the spectacular stuff of George Saunders, a writer who, while immersed in the literary establishment and the gruesome creative writing racket—he teaches creative writing at Syracuse University—apparently is of the opinion that a short story should be not dull, not pedestrian, but lively with creative effects and stylistic panache. Okay, so he does write “domestic fiction,” in the sense that his stories tell of ordinary Americans mired in ordinary American problems. But the big difference lies in HOW he tells his tales.

Saunders has a knack for getting into the heads of children or adolescents, taking the reader into that head and showing its inner workings. In the first story in his collection, “Victory Lap,” Alison Pope, 14, is reveling in life, dead sure of the spectacular festival that will be her future. She loves everyone at her school; loves the whole town. “Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday,” she is at home alone, entertaining herself with her own imagination. Bad, bad things are about to happen to her. Setting up for a change in point of view, the author has Alison taking note of Kyle Boot—fellow adolescent and next-door neighbor, a nerdy kid “whose mom and dad didn’t let him do squat”—on his return from cross-country practice.

Next we the reader are in Kyle’s head, and like Alison’s, it is a fine American head to be in. One thing about Saunders’ characters: although they may have their faults, may be roiling in life’s adversities, they are most often good people. But the character who next enters the narrative in “Victory Lap” is by no means a very good person. He apparently is Russian, and in America, be we in Hollywood, be we in the mind of anyone writing fiction, being Russian is almost automatically being the bad guy. Take Putin. Is there anybody badder or meaner on earth? Of course not.

We see things for a time from this lowlife character’s point of view. Saunders loves this switching about in POV when telling a story. What happens next is ACTION. Here again, we have a big difference from the standard boring story of domestic literary fiction, which most often has people agonizing, perhaps whining quite a bit, but not doing very much. In Saunders’ stories people do things.

Meanwhile, all the while the style of the Saunders story is throwing together bits and pieces of stylistic and structural panache. NB TO WRITERS HOPING TO MAKE A GOOD IMPRESSION WHILE WRITING SHORT STORIES: a story purporting to be LITERARY fiction must have stylistic and structural PANACHE. Near the end of “Victory Lap” Kyle smashes a bad guy in the head with a rock, killing him. “Then his body tumped over and Kyle turned to her [Alison] with this heartbroken look of My life is over. I killed a guy.”

Except, we soon learn, that this is what happens in Alison’s recurrent nightmares. In real life, after escaping, with the help of Kyle, from the Russian who intends to rape and kill her, she yells to Kyle not to bring the rock down. Saunders leaves a lot, as a good writer knows how to do, to the creative imagination of his reader. At the end of “Victory Lap” we have a scene describing Alison’s parents talking to her, telling her how well she and Kyle reacted to “a bad thing” that “happened to you kids.” We are not told whether or how Alison’s view on human beings (“Each of us is a rainbow.”) has changed. Nor do we get any inkling of how the violent episode affected Kyle, or how his overprotective parents have reacted to what he did.

In the title story, “Tenth of December,” another story with plot, we are taken into the mind of a boy, Robin, who is bullied at school. He spends a lot of time alone, and like many lonely children, he lives a rich imaginative life. Here we have another highly positive protagonist. His naivety is suggested by this passage: “Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?/ Is there icing on it? he’d said.” 

Another thing about the Saunders story: even in the saddest of situations the narrative is leavened with humor. Often quirky humor. So it turns out Dad and Kip Flemish had first traded spouses, then abandoned the spouses and fled together to California: gay swingers.

Here is Alison again, on dreams: “Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can’t do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can’t because you’re balancing a ball on your head.” After the interval of one very short story—a poignant one-page masterpiece titled “Sticks,” about a sad, confused man—we come to the next story and it is called “Puppy.”

Saunders is great at portraying everyday people in today’s America. In “Puppy” we meet Marie, another overprotective, gee-whiz-I’m-trying-my-best-to-be-an-ideal-mom American middle class mother. Marie strives to create a perfect life for her children, to make up for her own far-less-than-perfect childhood. She has a great middle-class husband named Robert the Jolly, who, whenever she brings home another exotic pet—such as an iguana that ends up biting him—never gets irritated; Robert just says “Ho Ho.”

Marie is another lover of life, like Alison in “Victory Lap,” but she is really more like somebody trying hard to show everyone what a lover of life she is: “Oh, God, what a beautiful world! . . . . Thank you, Lord, she thought, as the Lexus flew through the cornfield. You have given me so much: struggles and the strength to overcome them; grace, and new chances every day to spread that grace around. And in her mind she sang out, as she sometimes did when feeling that the world was good, and she had at last found her place in it, Ho Ho, ho HO!” Saunders writes with a touch of light irony. He may be somewhat critical of modern American mores. He certainly is critical of Marie the do-gooder, who ends up being the villain of this story. But he does not shout out his anger in heavy-handed satire. He whispers in light irony.

George Saunders frequently sets up dichotomies/contrasts. In “Puppy” we have the dichotomy of (1) self-righteous upper-middle-class Marie vs. (2) underclass-trailer-trash Callie, the owner of the puppy. The two meet when Marie comes with her children to see the puppy advertised for sale. Marie the Fastidious is shocked by the condition of the house: “the filth, the mildew smell, the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it . . . the spare tire on the dining room table.” More humor.

The puppy in the underclass home is adorable; the children want to take it. “Okay, then, all right [thinks Marie], they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha-ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Caint hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable . . .”

But then comes the climax of the story. Marie looks out in the back yard and sees a retarded boy, Bo, chained up like a dog, even apparently drinking from a dog’s dish. She is horrified. Now they will not adopt the ill-fated puppy. They will immediately depart this sordid scene, which her poor vulnerable children have had to see and may be scarred by the experience. Furthermore, later that day [thinks judgmental Marie] she will call Child Welfare, “where she knew Linda Berling, a very no-nonsense lady who would snatch this poor kid away so fast it would make that fat mother’s thick head spin.”

Saunders is apparently aware of how desperate situations can often be for well-meaning people and their children, when “very no-nonsense” authoritarian persons show up at their home and take the children away into foster care. Cases in which the children, not allowed even to say good-bye to their parents, are often terrified, where the burden of proof that they have NOT abused their children is placed on the parents. And you cannot get angry when they do this to you. If you show your anger this proves the fact of your mental instability. This is the way modern America—obsessed with doing good—often does very bad things.

The poignancy of “Puppy” lies in our knowledge that underclass Callie is not a bad parent, that she loves her boy Bo, and that he himself, quite a handful, does not resent being chained up for part of the day. He rather enjoys running the length of the chain. Then again there is the fate of the puppy, rejected by despicable Marie. Callie abandons it in a cornfield, so that her husband Jimmy will not have to kill it, as he has drowned kittens in the past. 

The story ends with Callie imagining a bright future for Bo, but the reader knows better. “Who loved him more than anyone else in the world loved him?” thinks Callie, whose son will soon be taken from her.

One critic in the London Review of Books speaks of “George Saunders’ dystopian workplace tragicomedies.” Some of Saunders’ stories remind you of the plots in the TV series “Black Mirror.” The action takes place in only-a-few-years-distant future, but technology and drugs have made their mark. In “Escape from Spiderhead” some future U.S. government has sent those convicted of crimes to an experimental institution, where they are dosed with various drugs to study their reactions. It is proven, for example, that the emotion of love between men and women is a factor of certain chemical combinations in the brain, nothing more than that.

The narrator Jeff, convicted of murdering an acquaintance in a moment of passion, is dosed with the love drug twice in the same day. He falls in “love” with two different women, and both of them (also drugged) passionately return his feelings. Later in the same day, after the drugs have worn off, “no trace of either of those great loves remains.”

“Escape from Spiderhead” is a kind of allegory. In human life you are not necessarily in love with two different women on the same day, but quite often you find yourself looking back on some grand passion of the past, wondering—as Jeff wonders after the drugs wear off—now, what was that all about?

Saunders has a way of showing the basic goodness in human beings. Although all of the subjects at the institute have committed crimes, most often murder, nobody wants to see another inmate receive a gratuitous dose of the feel-bad drug Darkenfloxx, which can be fatal. Furthermore, the narrator Jeff—to whom it has been proven in the experiments definitively that he does not love Rachel, in fact, has no feelings for her—Jeff ends up taking the Darkenfloxx himself, in effect dying to save Rachel’s life. We are reminded of Ukrainians during the German occupation of WWII. Many cooperated with the Nazis, sending innocent Jews to their deaths. But there were other Ukrainians who—risking their own lives and the lives of their children—hid away Jews and protected them. Saunders likes to write about the latter kind of Ukrainian (American).

“My Chivalric Fiasco” is set in another dystopian twilight zone, where the characters all work in some kind of medieval-themed amusement park attraction—with fake pigs and fake slop and even fake poop. The narrator Ted supports his whole family: Mom is sick, Beth is shy, and Dad has cracked his spine. Drugs once again play a big role in the action of the story. The whole plot revolves around Ted’s failure to keep a co-worker’s secret, as he is high on some drug that makes him super-self-righteous.

Saunders also has a good feel for the way things work in the American world of business. “Exhortation” is a pep-talk monologue/memorandum voiced by a typical “muddle management” type—Todd Birnie, Divisional Director. It grades off occasionally into the tale of Andy, a depressive co-worker. Saunders never fails to be entertaining. “Say we need to clean a shelf. Let’s use that example. If we spend the hour before the shelf-cleaning talking down the process of cleaning the shelf, complaining about it, dreading it, investigating the moral niceties of cleaning the shelf, whatever, then what happens is we make the process of cleaning the shelf more difficult than it really is. . . . Do I want to clean it happy, or do I want to clean it sad? Which would be more effective? For me? Which would accomplish my purpose more efficiently?” And so on. And on.

“Al Roosten” presents the title character in a state of crisis, as Saunders’ middle class well-meaning citizens often are. When Al appears in a voluntary charity auction, auctioning off his own talents and making a fool of himself in the process, “the room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh.” Saunders zeros in on a typical, but seldom described American emotion. When Al walks out the audience is pulled in two directions, toward open mockery of this idiot grading off into shouts of good will, described as “pity whoops” and “mercy cheers.”

Saunders himself is often a kind of pity whooper in regard to his characters. He writes about average Americans, most of them likable, striving to wend their way through the mine field that is their life. Al Roosten runs a bric-a-brac shop called Bygone Daze, a near bankrupt enterprise whose bygone days were probably never that good to begin with. Typical of the Saunders lead protagonists, Al is burdened by a family he must support, and the money is never quite enough. The story of Al’s life: “People were always seeing through him and frying his ass.”

Saunders frequently writes of the class pretensions of the average American family. Al Roosten hates Larry Donfrey of Donfrey Realty, another participant in the charity auction, because Donfrey leads a more successful life, appears to have a striking wife and wonderful children. The Donfrey family once came into his shop and seemed to take a patronizing view of Al’s merchandise. In a typical Saunders twist of plot, however, Al learns by chance that one of Donfrey’s children has a crippled leg, and immediately all his rancor dissipates.

In another of the author’s dystopian tragicomedies of the American quotidian, “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” another middle-class paterfamilias and loser is the narrator. Trying to keep up with their class peers in prestige, American families acquire girls from third-world countries (the SGs), and hang them out as beautiful displays from the trees in their yards (“Black Mirror” again).

Having just turned forty, the narrator/loser, who (like all Saunders protagonists) loves his family, gets the bright idea of writing a diary for future readers, so that they can learn what American life was like in the twenty-first century. He wonders, for example, if people of the future will know the sound of planes passing overhead in the night, since some day there will be no more planes. He wonders if they will know the sound of caterwauling cats in the night. The story runs for only two months of that diary, a time in which things go from bad to worse for the narrator’s family.

Great writing abounds in “The SG Girl Diaries,” and, as usual, the travails of the lead character are touching. Saunders always has a feel for workplace realities. For example, there is the scene in which “red-faced men in ties,” in an elevator are coming back from what is termed the Fall Fling, “making jokes about enough Fall Flinging, the Fall Fling has been Flung, etc., etc. Then the embarrassed silence as we, in our minds, resaid the things we had just enthusiastically heatedly said, as if vying for some sort of Stupid Utterance Prize.” Yes, perfect.

Next they all look up at the mirrored ceiling of the elevator, and Anders remarks, “I must appear pretty weird to birds.” After that nobody laughed, but they all made that grunting sound that stands in for laughter, “so Anders wouldn’t feel bad, as his mother has recently passed away.” Nice.

Once again, “The SG Girl Diaries” revolves around American parents who love their children, trying to be good parents for their kids, better parents than their own parents were for them, but usually failing. Money, or the lack thereof, looms large in much of what Saunders writes. His characters are always hard up; if only their sympathetic author, the reader thinks, could find a way to smuggle them some hard cash into the lines of the story. Saunders actually does play this almost deus ex machina role in “SG,” when the narrator wins the lottery and is on cloud nine. But just as in the old TV series, “The Millionaire,” coming into money makes for only very short-term happiness.

“Home” features a young man, Mike, just back from military service in Iraq or Afghanistan, dealing simultaneously with the chaos and STPD in his head and the chaos of his underclass family. Once again, the story is hilarious, while, at the same, time deeply sad. It features comic underclass Ma, who, in an attempt to rein in her potty mouth, says beep for all obscenities. “’Beep you’, she said. ‘They been on my case at work.’” Her slovenly boyfriend Harris (“he makes up crazy beep about me all the time”) is another hoot.

Mike’s sister Renee has married somewhat higher than her class, to Ryan. But, as usual in America, class distinctions are dependent largely on money. “Ryan’s parents had sonorous confident voices that seemed to have been fabricated out of previous, less sonorous/confident voices by means of sudden money.” 

Mike wanders about, aloft on his PTSD: “A plan would start flowing directly down to my hands and feet . . . . My face would go hot and I’d feel sort of like, Go, go, go.” The most poignant line in the story is his thought directed at all those around him: “You sent me there; now bring me back.” Everyone he comes across, however, has little more to say to him than the standard (automatic and insincere), “Thank you for your service.”

This is a great collection of stories, George Saunders. Thank you for your service in writing such exemplary fiction in the genre of the creative short story.

THE GREAT BOONDOGGLE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

The Great Nabacocoa

THE GREAT AMERICAN BOONDOGGLE

(The Sad State of the American Short Story)

The situation has been the same for years. Nothing ever seems to change and practically no one deems it necessary even to talk about it. Almost forty years ago a colleague at the university where I taught, a lifelong reader of The New Yorker and a person whose intelligence I respect, said to me, “I love The New Yorker, but I never read the fiction. ‘The New Yorker story’ does not appeal to me.” In a visit to my general practitioner a month ago, the doctor, an avid reader of classical literary fiction—the canonical literary works of the world—remarked, “I love the articles in The New Yorker, but I never read the fiction. Most of it is a total bore.” Over a period of forty years how many other intelligent readers of fiction have said the same thing? Repeatedly. Why is nobody listening?

Over the past ten years I have subscribed to a variety of American literary journals. Someone advised me to try reading Agni, where, so they said, some of the best fiction in the country was being published. I subscribed to Agni for two years and never found a single short story of genuine literary merit. With few exceptions the same was true of the other “literary” journals I read.

At times I was simply astonished by the winners of literary prizes. I would read the whole story and gasp with amazement. That story won a prize? That’s a story not even worth publishing. I also subscribed to One Story for a couple of years. Here, once again, since they publish only one story in each issue, you’d think their standards for what they accept would be high. Alas, their standards are low, and most of what they publish is hardly worth reading.

Sometimes I thought that part of the problem was me. I taught Russian literature for thirty years, so I cut my literary teeth on some of the best fiction ever published. Do modern writers publishing in the U.S. today simply have lower standards? Is it no longer cool to be ambitious, to want to write fiction with verve and panache, to aim for something entirely new and unique?

The standard pedestrian story, the kind of thing I cannot stand, is in the genre of what has come to be called “domestic literary fiction.” The characters are often middle-class Americans, caught up in their daily dramas of adultery or psychological trauma. The style is bland, straight realism, with few or no stylistic embellishments. The structure is often lax, with few narrative arcs, without a clear beginning, middle and end. There is no LITERATURE in these stories, and maybe I would be less offended by their omnipresence in every American journal I come across if they would just change the name: domestic fiction. Leave the ‘literary’ out. The stories would still be as egregiously dull and unimaginative, but at least they would no longer pretend to be literature.

I have subscribed to The New Yorker for forty years. I have not done a survey, but I suspect that at least half the stories published there are in the category of “domestic literary fiction.” Maybe it’s more like two thirds. In other words, the magazine widely considered the best repository of quality fiction in the whole country is publishing more dreck than good fiction. How many different fiction editors has the magazine gone through over that long time period? Wasn’t there a single one of them who could read fiction creatively? Lovers of literature should be up in arms and marching on New York, but nobody is. WHY NOT?

In the late eighties or early nineties The New Yorker started coming out with an annual “fiction edition.” For the first couple of times the yearly issue was wonderful, packed with interesting creative writing. John Updike, a survivor from the time period before the mass deterioration in fictional quality, was still publishing his stuff back then. But quite rapidly the business of the “fiction edition” went into decline. Look at this year’s offerings and you’ll find very little fiction. In lieu of fiction the regular contributors now write little autobiographical pieces about how they spent their vacations on beaches catching crabs as children.

Let’s take a couple of concrete examples to illustrate my point. Here is the beginning of a recent story in The New Yorker: “Close to five hours on the train. And then twenty minutes by taxi from the station to the school. He would have time to call the lawyer, work through the options. He had the number of a consultant, in case Rowan needed to apply somewhere else. Maybe the school legally had to contact the college he’d got into, but Richard wasn’t sure. And maybe it wouldn’t come to that. The school wouldn’t want to make anything public. The thought calmed him—good, good. They were on his side, even if they had not said so in so many words: they weren’t stupid.”

Is there anything about this lead paragraph that makes the reader want to read on? I see practically nothing. Is there even a faint taint of literature here? None. So where was the appeal for the fiction editor of The New Yorker who decided to publish this? Does the story get better later on? Hardly. This is exactly the kind of fiction that my literature- loving doctor is not going to read.

In recent years foreign writers of English-language fiction have been frequently published in American literary journals. These are sometimes persons born abroad, sometimes persons born in the U.S. of recently immigrated parents. You might think, Well wonderful. Stories set in other countries, based on exotic foreign cultures, will bring novel and exiting verve to the American short story. Alas, it appears that large numbers of such writers have bought into the gruesome American tradition of mediocrity. Their characters may be African or Indonesian, but they are fully as humdrum as the American characters mired in “domestic literary fiction.”

Another recent story in The New Yorker, written by a Chinese-American writer, is set in China. It begins with three Americans, Adrian, Peter (Adrian’s boyfriend) and Bella standing outside a restaurant “famous for its Peking duck.” We have the beginnings of a story in which, perhaps, something will happen. Then nothing does. Adrian and Peter fly back to the States, and for the whole rest of the story the Chinese-American Bella agonizes over her past. As if creative writing courses have neglected altogether the idea of STRUCTURE in short fiction, the whole first page of the story goes wandering around in the pluperfect tense.

“Bella had known Peter for twenty-five years. They had shared a place with two other housemates in Boston when they were in law school, and for as long as they had been friends they had been talking about visiting China together.” Why bother telling us this, since the visit to China together is already done (Peter has flown back to the U.S.)? The story is not about him; it is solely about hangdog Bella.

“Adrian was a writer, and he was working on ‘a multigenerational and intercontinental epic,’ based on his family history, and during the past two weeks the three of them had toured a number of towns on the East China Sea, sifting through local archives, tracing the untraceable.” Once again, if we are to have a story with Adrian in it, then write that story. As it is, all of this pluperfect summing up of things about Adrian serves no purpose. If you want a story about Bella’s tribulations why not just eliminate the whole first page? Thank God that at least we the readers are not forced to delve into Adrian’s “intercontinental epic.” This story about the divagations of Bella’s mind, however—even after we get rid of Peter and Adrian—goes nowhere and does nothing. Why did The New Yorker publish it?

And mind you, The New Yorker publishes fiction only from agented writers. If Lev Tolstoy or Anton Chekhov sent in their very best fiction unsolicited, it would receive zero consideration. So behind these writers and these stories there are literary agents, there is a history of grooming in some creative writing program at a university. You check out the author’s website on the internet, and, sure enough, she has a background in a creative writing program, in fact one of the most famous; she is a highly regarded writer who has won awards for her fiction. 

Why does this not surprise me? Well, it would have, back before I was aware of the present-day standards in mediocrity that are widely accepted all over the publishing world. All along the line there must be people who have encouraged and continue to encourage this kind of stagnant, dead writing. But WHY?

Once at a public reading a few years ago, a successful writer of short stories, quite well known, remarked, “When I was in an MFA program the only thing they allowed us to write was ‘domestic literary fiction.’” When I heard him say this I nearly rose up in rebellion and marched upon the proscenium where he stood. I cannot prove it, but I suspect that the problem of the American short story has its origins largely in the creative writing racket that flourishes all over American universities. 

Instructors in creative writing programs must publish their fiction in order to perpetuate their careers. Many of them write in the gruesome and unforgivable genre of “domestic literary fiction.” They make names for themselves, they publish their stuff in the “literary” journals. They win awards for the dreck they publish. Even worse, they perpetuate the problem by encouraging their creative writing students to write the same way. How did they win the awards? Because the prizes are given out by other hopelessly mind-numbing writer/judges who write the same crap.

In other words, everyone—creative writing instructors, agents, publishers, arbiters of literary taste, and most readers—everyone has agreed to look at the king with no clothes on and not notice his nakedness. Why, I keep asking why, and I have already provided a few answers. Here is another: publishers still want to make money, and High Art has never been much for making money. What few readers of fiction that remain in the U.S. today are, largely, readers of the pap of which I speak. Probably a lot of them think that this is what real fiction is. As Donald Trump would say—if Trump were a reader of good fiction, or even a reader of anything—SAD.

The narrator of a recent novel by the Chinese émigré writer Ha Jin, The Boat Rocker, has this to say about restrictions on the Chinese writer of fiction in Red China: “those writers, every one of them, were talented but had to toe the line, not only on the page but also in their imaginations, because they received salaries from the state and could not afford to jeopardize their livelihoods.” You say, Yeah, that’s China, but there is no censorship in America. But haven’t writers of U.S. fiction, intent on making careers, sold out their imaginations in similar ways? Not sold out to the political pressures of the ruling government, but to the pressures of the ruling trends in mediocre writing.

I sometimes think that most people, deep, deep down, are most comfortable with mediocrity. Human nature is such that in any life’s endeavor things are so set up as to find a common denominator in the pedestrian. One amazing discovery that I made while a member of American Academia is that university professors are often little interested in creativity. While professing to be great lovers of the liberal viewpoint politically, many of them are pompously pedantic arch-reactionaries at the core. Don’t try to make things better by suggesting radical new ways of doing things in Academia; they will fight you tooth and nail.

Then again, take a look at the American “free press.” Why is it that U.S. media networks all run the same news on a given evening, and all with basically the same slant? Who is the backdoor operator organizing this everyday conformity of opinion? Why, for example, is there not a single news outlet giving us, say, the Russian view of the brouhaha concerning so-called “Russian interference” in the recent U.S. presidential election? Because the Russians are assumed automatically to be guilty, since the Russians are always the bad guys. Americans take psychological comfort in knowing there are always Russians around, to bear the brunt of all the badness. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Hollywood was in a quandary for a time: who will be the bad guys in our movies now? Then they found the easy solution: although Russians aren’t communists anymore, they still are bad.

Why, to take another example, did not a single news commentator anywhere question the veracity of reporting on the most recent gas attack in Syria (April, 2017)? President Trump sent in Cruise missiles to punish our favorite bad guy, Assad, but nobody stopped to think: you know, it simply makes no sense that Assad, or his Russian allies would be behind that attack on civilians. Just at the point when our new president was prepared to consider a new approach to Assad, BAM, another use of poison gas on civilians. It’s simply not believable, but, once again, it’s a comfort for Americans, who always prefer simple answers to complicated questions. 

And mediocrity. Take American beers, all brewed for beer drinkers with absolutely no taste, and all selling voluminously. Beer drinkers in Germany, Holland, England, etc., etc., take a taste of such a beer and say, “What? Americans drink this? And elect Trump as our President. And watch movies made by Woody Allen. Anyone with brains is aware that these days Woody Allen's movies are terrible; he should have stopped making movies twenty years ago. But everyone goes on pretending that his films are worth watching. A recent article in The Atlantic said as much.

As for The New Yorker, luckily there are a few bright spots in the fiction offerings. Offhand I’d say the magazine has five or six stories a year worth reading. This year I have appreciated Kirstin Valdez Quade’s story with its origins in The Lives of the Saints, “Christina the Astonishing,” and a story by Etgar Keret, “Fly Already”—true, this one is not by an American writer; it is translated from the Hebrew, but at least they published it. 

Acknowledged masters of American fiction make their way occasionally into the pages of The New Yorker. A recent issue featured “The Itch” by Don DeLillo, about a man caught up in the typical DeLillo malaise: “He was forty-four years old, trapped in his body. Arms, legs, torso. Face did not itch. Scalp developed something that a doctor gave a name to, but it itched only rarely, then not at all, so the name didn’t matter.” And so on, in the same vein. If you’re looking for the very best in DeLillo, try his magnificent comic novel, White Noise, one of the best pieces of American fiction of the twentieth century.

Another big exception is the writer George Saunders, who is also a contributor to The New Yorker and a participant in the grand boondoggle of the creative writing racket—he teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. The most recent of his stories I have read in The New Yorker is “Mother’s Day” (Feb., 2016), and it, once again, is wonderful, full of great humor and stylistic panache. Someone as creative as Saunders is certainly aware of the sad state of the modern short story, so why doesn’t he come out and say something about it? Well, why should he jeopardize his position in the pantheon by accusing his fellow writers of insipidity and phoniness? That would make him appear ungrateful and arrogant.

In the same issue of The New Yorker containing the story of Bella, there is an article about the well-known writer of short fiction, Grace Paley, a writer of the domestic quotidian. “Paley initially suspected that her work would be considered ‘trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, and not interesting,’ but she couldn’t help it: ‘Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me.’”

What is the difference between Paley’s domestic fiction and the stifling domestic fiction that is rampant today? The main difference is that Paley’s fiction is WRITTEN. What does that mean? Take this example from one of her stories, “A Conversation with My Father,” a tale in which the eighty-six-year-old father of the narrator, sick in bed, asks her to entertain him with a story about “simple people.” Here is what she comes up with at first, a story that is NOT WRITTEN.

“Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. The boy at about fifteen became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt so much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her.”

The narrator’s old father then complains that she has left everything out of the story. How did the woman look? Who were her parents that she should end up like this? The next attempt by the narrator is WRITTEN. What makes it WRITTEN? See the passages I have italicized below.

“Once, across the street from us, there was a fine handsome woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later). This boy, when he fell into the fist of adolescence, became a junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote persuasive articles for his high-school newspaper. Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand distribution a periodical called ‘Oh! Golden Horse!’

“In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine-tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad habits a home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie. . . .”

The writer of the article Alexandra Schwartz goes on to say the following: “On the branches of the bare first draft, life begins to bud. Before the woman seemed delusional, pathetic. Now we see her goodness, her confused optimism, her protective love for her son. The narrator’s tone turns rueful, tender; a piece of gossip has become literature” (New Yorker, May 8, 2017, p. 67-68). Well, maybe not high art, but yes, literature, and why? Because it is WRITTEN.

Oh, that only Vladimir Nabokov were still around, with his high standards for what is good literature and his hound dog’s instinct for frauds and literary trash. I would advocate forcing the fiction editor of The New Yorker, plus the fiction editors of all the American “literary” journals—before they accept for publication another single story—to read all of Grace Paley’s fiction. If they don’t have time for that, let them read one story published in The New Yorker back before the advent of the Age of Egregious: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.” Here we have a mere five pages of sheer aching loveliness. Well, it too features an American domestic scene, describing an old Russian Jewish émigré couple; they live in an American city and have a grown son who is mentally ill.

But what a difference between Nabokov’s story and the pap/dreck that has long since become the new normal. What a plethora of lovely lines, what an amplitude of emotion! Read just this one story, modern-day writer of American fiction, and try to get at least a little bit ambitious! Forget everything they’ve told you back in those dismal creative writing courses.

Write something new and unique, try for something original. Then don’t send it anywhere until you’ve revised and polished it eight, ten, twenty fifty times—until it coruscates and gleams like a precious gem of lapis lazuli. Okay, we cannot all be Nabokov, but we can at least make an effort to transcend the dreck. Not interested in writing LITERATURE? Fine. Good. Go on writing the stultifying stuff, but don’t pretend that it’s literary.

The American Literary Establishment has recently been shaken up by the power of Amazon, frightened to the core by that power. I say good for Amazon, which does not have to indulge in the fakery of The Establishment. Amazon has done some highly positive things for American Letters. Take, for one example, the thing of the editorial review. Amazon customer reviews now cut into the reprehensible practice of having establishment literary figures write automatic positive reviews for any writer who is already IN. This often makes for an interesting contrast. We no longer have to trust the editorial reviews, when on Amazon we can read often highly intelligent customer reviews of the same books. The editorial reviews for established writers, were they to give stars, would all be starred at 4.5 and 5.0. When the customer reviews for the same book are at 3.0, we suspect that the writer of the editorial review has been engaged in meretricious fakery.

d

Herein appended is the final section of a recent review I wrote of a novel by Elif Batuman, The Idiot. My jeremiad here resembles, in some respects, that above, repeats some of the same points, but comes at the discussion from a slightly different viewpoint.

Although Elif Batuman has published only two books, both relatively recently, she has already made it big time in the Eastern Literary Establishment. Many American writers would give their right writing hand to be where she already is. Ms. Batuman has a literary agent in the most prestigious agency in New York, she is a contributor/staff writer for The New Yorker. She has hotshot editors on high, and her books are reviewed at the highest levels: The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, etc. No matter how good or bad her next novel is, it will without doubt be favorably reviewed at the same high levels as The Idiot—not really a very good novel—has just been reviewed. That’s the way the game works, after you are accepted into the IN crowd.

So what Ms. Batuman needs to do at this point is stop listening to the hotshot establishment agents and editors and write something that is real literature. Unlike so many modern American writers, those who have come out of creative writing programs, she has taken the time to read the great writers; she knows what literature is. For her first novel I can imagine the agent telling her, “Stick to the timeworn pattern, don’t get far away from realism, describe the everyday life of a girl who resembles yourself. Write ‘domestic literary fiction,’ for this is what sells in America. Don’t get too cute in your first published work. Nobody needs too much creativity.” So she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about her days at Harvard. Okay, she has listened to that spiel once, but now that she is in with the in crowd, she can write whatever kind of fiction she likes. She should.

Elif Batuman is aware of the vast wasteland that is the creative writing industry in the U.S. How do I know? Because in her nonfiction work, The Possessed (something of a companion work to The Idiot), she expresses strong opinions about that puerile racket. Just beginning her creative life, she drops in on a writing workshop on Cape Cod, where the lead guru tells her, “If you want to be an academic, go to graduate school; if you want to be a writer come here.” The implication is that you need not even read and discuss the great writers of the past. Instead you sit around reading and critiquing short stories by pedestrian writers who have read, largely, other pedestrian writers. Who, furthermore, buy into deadening trends like “political correctness” in fiction. Who actually worry about offending people. Great writers are often eager to offend people.

Here's what Franz Kafka said on that subject. “We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply . . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” He’s talking LITERATURE, fellow Homosapien. And AMBITIOUS writing.

“For many years [goes on Elif Batuman], I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism. In 2006, n + I magazine asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy day on Cape Cod” (The Possessed).

“I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of ‘craft.’ . . . . I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns.”

This critique of the modern American short story goes on for two more pages and concludes as follows: “Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.” Domestic literary realism. Urggh.

This revelation—that the “best stories” written in the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 (and, alas, any other recent year) are bad stories—should open the eyes of the writing world. But given that the whole writing industry and publishing enterprise prefers to proceed with eyes shut, nothing essentially will be changed. In creative writing programs all over the U.S. “creative writers” teach their students to value the same twaddle. After which the students graduate, get positions as creative writing instructors, and perpetuate the problem. The best solution would be to abolish all creative writing departments in every university in the country. Then ban the genre of “domestic literary fiction.” 

When I am elected President, I will issue an executive order to that effect. Dream on.

But what about the good writers? you may ask. Some good writers come out of creative writing programs. Fine, but we need not worry about the good ones. They will find their own way; they have no need of people encouraging mediocrity and feeding them platitudes: “show, don’t tell,” and “you can’t use adverbs.”

As is obvious, however, Elif Batuman is already aware of the Vast Egregious Boondoggle that is the contemporary American short story. I’m sure she is also aware that the people interested in selling books—her agent, her editors, all of the establishment literary world—would prefer that her next novel stay with realistic characters and pedestrian plots. She is in a position now to defy those agents and editors. Write something new, vivid, vital now, Elif. Something ambitious, something with literary panache. Write us a piece of LITERATURE.