In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

I’ve been reading George Saunders for a while now. I started with Pastoralia (2000) and then went back to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) before going forward in time with In Persuasion Nation (2006). I have strong feelings about Saunders and his writing, which I will share with you now. For one thing, he is reliably terrible with titles. Not since Barry Hannah has an author so angered me with his short story titles. Here’s a brief selection from In Persuasion Nation: “Jon,” “Adams,” “93990” and “Commcomm.” These are essentially cyphers, they are place holders for a title and have no real meaning or effect on the story until after I have already read it. Perhaps it is me being old fashioned, but a really excellent story title gives me just enough to work with, just enough hint of what I may find in store for me when I embark upon a reading. What’s even more infuriating is that Saunders does execute the occasional good title, almost all of which become the title stories for his collections. My favorite title is also attached to my favorite story of his, “The Falls,” but I’ll get to that.

I place Saunders among the movement that comes closest to what David Foster Wallace anticipated as ‘The New Sincerity.’ He often gets put in a literary lineage with Kurt Vonnegut (a personal favorite of mine) and while they share some key similarities, I think Saunders is ultimately more of a lyricist than Vonnegut. Ultimately, all of Vonnegut’s narrators sound the same (like Vonnegut himself) but it’s what they’re saying that’s more important than how they are saying it. Don't get me wrong, Vonnegut’s voice is a good voice, perfected over a short but crucial period of his career (between his first and second novels, if you can believe it), and works across the various books. But for Saunders, every character’s voice is different. Many are ignorant, uneducated, or just coarse with language and thought (my dissertation chair told me that Saunders' humor often comes at the expense of his characters who are uniformly poor, uneducated, and down trodden, and he's not entirely wrong there). There’s a cadence that captures how his characters feel and behave and thus there is more nuance and room for gray areas. Three of the stories from In Persuasion Nation are told from the point of view of a character who is directly responsible for 1.) the murder of an entire family 2.) inciting and supporting mob violence that leads to several deaths and the extermination of most small animals kept as pets, and 3.) the cold, objective analysis of the experimentation, torture, and execution of a collection of primates. These were all painful stories to read, and each sickened me in its own way. But that’s part of the point, because each of the narrators in these stories believes himself to be in the right in his actions. There’s also some savage irony at work, particularly in the primate experimentation story (which has the god-awful title “93990” mentioned above). In this particular example, the irony is that we as human readers feel for the primates who are made to suffer under this inhuman experimentation (which borders on torture, especially for the primate with the number that shares the story’s title), while the narrative voice maintains a cold, objective distance through expository reporting. Yet the exposition of the one primate that survives begins to accrue an intense feeling to it, almost like by focusing on this one animal and his resilience to all attempts to destroy him, we still feel the emotional connection that allows us to sympathize and empathize with him. It’s not exactly what Wallace predicted, with ironic narrative looping back around on itself to allow for sincere feeling, but Saunders has made his career out of this kind of postmodern lyricism.

I got to hear Saunders read in 2000 as part of promotional touring he was doing for Pastoralia. He read “Sea Oak” which is the big, showy piece from that collection, and it was a transformative experience to hear him read it aloud. I had read it as part of a creative writing workshop I was enrolled in at the time and I'll confess that I hadn’t gotten the story. Hearing him do voices, and the cadence of his speech as he said certain lines communicated all the comedy that I had been missing. It’s satiric, yes, but also absurd, and extremely delightful to hear Saunders say in a performative old lady zombie voice, “Show your cock!” It’s a good story, and a sad one. Almost all of his stories are sad, even the ones that end well enough (like “My Flamboyant Grandson” and “Bohemians” from In Persuasion Nation). The best from Pastoralia, though, is “The Falls.” While this blog post takes In Persuasion Nation as its reference point for Must Read, I would amend that Saunders as author period is must read, in particular “The Falls.” In that story, two characters are walking along the bank of a river that leads to the falls of the title and both observe a boat of young girls travel past them toward the falls. One character is very relatable and forthright, an overtly good person, and the other is mean and suspicious and aggravating, an unpleasant person if not a bad one. They both realize that the girls are in trouble and each has to make a decision about what to do or the girls will go over the falls and die. As you might expect, each character behaves antithetical to how we’ve been made to feel about them up to this point. The aggravating character, who you would never want to live next to or have to eat a meal with, begins pulling off his clothes, in tears, because he knows that while he must try and save these girls, he will fail and they will all die. But in this moment of true courage, facing his fear of an inevitable death that has humiliated and broken our likable character, this aggravating character transforms into a real human person, one I would do anything for because he values the need to do the right thing in a hopeless and impossible situation. The story ends with him in that moment, and I’ve read few like it that is utterly beautiful in capturing what miraculous good even a terrible person is capable of (see also Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem”(which, by the way, is a fantastic title)).

I didn’t weep at the end of “The Falls,” though I could now if I read it again. I was emotionally withdrawn due to the end of a thirteen and a half year relationship when I read it for the first time a couple of years ago, and the fact alone it got me to acknowledge that the meanest and lowest among us might be capable of true courage to save another person’s life was miraculous to me in its own right, tears not included. It’s for this reason, then, that I am a fan of Saunders, despite my problems and issues with particular aesthetic choices he makes. There is a sincerity at the center of each of his stories that evokes the best in me emotionally. What we feel is at least as important as what we think, and depending on the day, maybe it’s more important.

I did cry twice while reading In Persuasion Nation: for “Jon” and “Commcomm.” The first is something of a retelling of Flowers for Algernon, but in this case Jon (standing in for Charly) has no memory of his life before his upgrade. That makes the choice he faces of being downgraded all the more poignant, and his reasons for ultimately choosing to do so left me sobbing with a broken heart. The second story is too convoluted to explain, but it’s a familiar Saunders story of a poor loser living with the ghost of his parents in a world familiar but oddly parallel to our own who dies at the end but then becomes something finer than he was after being killed. The idea of redemption after death is as old as the Bible, but for some reason there was such hope and inspiration to be found at the end of that story (and like “The Falls” in Pastoralia, “Commcomm” ends In Persuasion Nation) it left me inconsolable for a solid ten minutes. The ending put me in touch with my own need for redemption, a desire to do something that will allow me to be forgiven, if not by some higher power or another person, then by allowing me to forgive myself. For Saunders, unlike Vonnegut, the language and lyricism is the heart of feeling with and for these characters and what happens. Like Vonnegut, Saunders writes deceptively simple stories, infused with dark humor, but his power to evoke pity, charity, and empathy is undeniable. And on this day and in this age, I know I could use more feelings of pity, charity, and empathy than I’ve managed up until now.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

From there I revisited Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972, English language translation 1974 by William Weaver). Calvino writes in Marco Polo’s voice as he relates stories to Kublai Khan about cities in his vast empire across the globe. Why am I relating this book to you? Because you are a reader every bit as much as Khan was a conqueror. Books are your kingdom, and though you may not have ever visited Invisible Cities before, it is there waiting for you.

The book is arranged mathematically so that in 55 separate sections Marco Polo relates a type of city five times. That makes for eleven city types. These sections are divided into larger blocks of nine, with ten sections in the first and ninth blocks, and five sections in the remaining blocks of two through eight. Framing each block are interstitial passages rendered in italics which narrate the interactions between Marco and the Great Khan. These interstitial passages loosely form an overarching story that ties all of the sections together into one narrative whole of Marco’s travels and the expression of wonders in Kublai’s empire (also the world at large).

I have heard the tales of other travelers to Invisible Cities. They—who say it is a monument to postmodern literature, or that it is a wondrous artifact of magical realism—would be the same to point to Ulysses as the greatest novel of the 20^th century, or to The Coast of Chicago as a collection of dreamlike landscapes. Which is to say nothing of the value of the book itself, what it provides to its citizens in the way of sustenance, inspiration, direction, or shelter. Invisible Cities is a book that is designed to show you how it can be read and how to read other books, all books, as well.

During my visit this time I found a section within Invisible Cities titled “Invisible Cities.” It was not a section I recalled reading before, and in truth if you pick up a copy right now it won’t be in the table of contents nor will you happen upon it suddenly flipping through the page headings. As the title suggests, it’s invisible, and can only be discerned indirectly. Nothing is truly invisible, but it can be difficult to recognize unless you look for the distortion, the particular bend in the refraction of light that tells you something is there even though you cannot see it.

In this hidden section I saw not Venice, not the fanciful descriptions of cities made of water pipes or maps arranged like stellar constellations. No, I saw the city that was made of words, the buildings standing on the foundation of ideas. I saw myself as a resident of this city, not only buying my groceries and driving down its streets, but changing the landscape and building a new school. We are not all academics or English majors, but we are all students of literature. Walking the alleys and byways of Invisible Cities is like opening a single book to find a great library within.