Sunday With Books: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Here’s me attempting to describe George Saunders’ first book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline to a friend not too long ago:
“Think Seinfeld, meets that guy from American Psycho, meets Larry David, but they’re all in a Pynchon novel.” He gave me a confused look and said, “Sorta sounds like a Simpsons episode,” to which I replied: “You’re not far off.”
Published in 1996, each story in CivilWarLand sees Saunders taking the then-and-current state of American hyper-consumerism and following it to it some cartoonish logical extreme. The end result is always the sort of disturbed Americana you might expect from a name like Vonnegut or Pynchon.
Those familiar with the author know his trademark quirks, like how his stories usually don’t start making sense at all until two-thirds the way through, or how deciphering the real substance of the story amidst all the zany wordplay and off-kilter dialogue is often a task in itself; There’s always more beneath the surface, and then some.
It also turns out that Saunders was something of a prophet as far as the impending wave pool retail apocalypse thing goes. See: The Wavemaker Falters. — Jackson Todd
