“How can you take the word of a man with biscuit crumbs under his nose and a habit of walking around holding his hand over his anus for fear of violation?”
Alternating between hilarious and unrelentingly depressing, "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" marks the memorable debut of perhaps America's pre-eminent satirist, George Saunders.
“The moon comes up over Delectable Videos like a fat man withdrawing himself from a lake.”
The writer depicts a bleak future that features the uncanny valley of consumerism, relying on spineless main characters who see ghosts but exhibit little agency. "Isabelle" is dark but pretty, "400-Pound CEO" was cruel to the point of being difficult to read, and "The Wavemaker Falters" repeatedly withholds any chance of redemption.
“Family. It’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s damn hard. But I look after her and she squeals with delight when I come home, and the sum total of sadness in the world is less than it would have been.
“Her real name is Isabelle.
“A pretty, pretty name.”
"Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" was my favorite, displaying a sly beauty that most of the other entries seem to lack, opting for cruelty for cruelty's sake instead.
“Connie’s a prostitute, I’m a thirty-year-old virgin, but all things considered, we could have turned out worse.”
Saunders's work -- characteristic of many debuts -- is a little confusing and a lot depressing, creating space for him to find his true voice in future books like "Liberation Day," "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," "Fox 8," and "Lincoln in the Bardo."
Nearly 30 years later, "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" is demented, hysterical, and challenging -- if startlingly prescient.
“‘The writer can choose what he writes about,’ Flannery O’Connor once said, ‘but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’”
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