“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 was writing about the unforgiving nature of the short form, but he might as well have been referring to the worlds in which his characters are trapped. Why is such a nice man so mean to the nice people he invents?
In interviews, Saunders comes across as a benignly thoughtful regular guy, a practising Buddhist who constantly tries for kindness. Some part of his writing day, however, is spent imagining complex and original ways to punish the people he has created. They are trapped by their own foolishness, or by the dreams of hyper-capitalism. They are also sometimes locked up underground, or suspended in intriguing configurations. “Suspended” here does not just mean “existing between one state and another” – though they are also that. It means hung up and left dangling, like abandoned puppets.
The 2012 story The Semplica Girl Diaries was a kind of signature piece for Saunders in his more speculative mode. In it, a man buys an “SG” lawn decoration which, we slowly discover, is made by stringing up immigrant women, as though on a washing line, by means of a micro-fibre inserted through their brains.
In this new collection, the eponymous story Liberation Day explores a similar conceit from the inside. In this case, the narrator himself is pinioned on a non-specific “wall” waiting to become an orchestrated voice in an evening concert conducted by his owner. As with the washing line, the reader is not invited to believe the hokum science; the explanation is kept loose. We do, however, keenly understand the sense of suspension, of a waking sleep or living death that this amnesiac chorus represents.
Saunders’ characters are happy in their difficulty, at least at first. In Ghoul, they are performers in a huge theme park that seems to have no limits, and they love their stupid jobs. These happy prisoners endure cheery degradations while holding outlandish props and, as in other stories, they are plucky, hopeful and hugely anxious to please. Their creator subjects these lovely, fretful people to pratfall and disaster, all of it brilliantly escalated, in order to show us lives made antic by denial. The result is both tragic and lighthearted. Even pinned to a wall and with their memories wiped, they are so darn proud and self-improving and willing to be good, you might say they are the best of America.
Saunders invents these joke prisons in order to remind the reader of the various prisons – economic, psychological and spiritual – which we build for ourselves. The first and last is the prison of the self: “You are trapped in you,” a voice says to the protagonist of The Mom of Bold Action, after an ordinary woman’s moral outrage goes awry. Even in this naturalistic piece, however, the voice enters her car as an imagined “beam of forgiveness” that is “green” and which lands “near the glove compartment”. When you are in the habit of making the allegorical physical, it is a simple step to hanging the poor and indebted on washing lines and walls.
Saunders characteristically begins a story with someone mid-thought, their diction fragmented, like jottings or notes made before their purpose becomes clear.
Why was she holding a can opener?
Hmm.
That could be something.
It’s as if the characters are making their lives up as they go along. Many are talking to themselves, their cadences running close to internal chatter, that repetitive self‑talking monologue that can be hard to shake out of your head. This sense of enclosure slows the reveal, both to the character and (at a wilful stretch) to the reader, of the conditions they must escape. On the way, there are vaudevillian bursts of delight, reverses, surprises and romance. These stories are not afraid of plot. Much of the pleasure of reading them comes from watching Saunders take an outrageous premise and resolve it by the rules of old-fashioned fiction in a bravura, high-wire act.
A pleasing thing about the characters in Liberation Day is how many of them are, in one way or another, artists and creators. They write emails or provoking essays; their fictions and opinions have an effect in the world. Some exist in the space between performance and creation and they love their work because it makes new meanings, and is sometimes beautiful. Liberation Day involves a runaway choral interpretation of Custer’s last stand, which remakes the myth of the lonely hero on the hill.
A nostalgia for American optimism runs through these pages, and this includes a nostalgia for half-decent capitalism, one in which the rich held their economic fodder in something like affection. Saunders is never less than political; he seems to say it is no longer possible to be otherwise. Love Letter, the simplest and most chilling story here, is dated 202-, and it shows the slide into an authoritarian society, as seen from a suburban front porch. No one seems to notice; they just feel a mild discomfort, like the slowly boiled frog.
In these punitive worlds in which people fail further, by choice and by misadventure, it seems impossible that they will find a way forward, but they do. By the end of a Saunders story, the characters know what is going on; they see their condition, and this awareness is a gift and the possible beginning of change. The resolutions are sometimes tiny. “What she had to do now,” thinks the mom of bold action, “was reach over, pick up the bag, open the car door, drop one foot into the grey slush.” That much she can do.
These characters are not redeemed or saved, they do not transcend: the hint is in the title – these stories are about liberation. In Mother’s Day a character dies right there on the page, and she finds wisdom and relief in the idea that she can now, finally, stop being who she is.
Saunders is the all-American Buddhist whose novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, described something that had never been written before: the release of the dead from the strictures of self. The same fusion of spirituality and patriotism makes Liberation Day a unique read. Saunders is funny and kind as ever, and his narrative virtuosity puts him up there with the best. I just hope he doesn’t feel too trapped by the perils and pleasures of the desk.
• Liberation Day by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
