Writers to admire queue up on the back cover of George Saunders’s new book in an earnest arms race of praise. “He will be read long after these times have passed,” Zadie Smith says. “George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time,” Khaled Hosseini suggests. “He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless,” Jonathan Franzen insists. “We’re lucky to have him.”
It is hard to imagine Saunders himself not cracking up at all that solemn hyperbole. Do the nine, often wonderfully absurd, short stories within live up to this billing? Well, you might say, yes and no. After the Booker success of Lincoln in the Bardo, his only novel, Saunders has returned to the form in which he has always written, forever restlessly reinventing its possibilities, once again enjoying his own brilliant dexterities and exploring truths about the way we live now.
There is a compulsiveness about the imagining, as if he can’t not do it. One of the narrators here, The Mom of Bold Action, a frustrated writer, shares that curse, sees tales in everything. By lunchtime in the kitchen, she has essayed in her head introductory paragraphs to “The Trusty Little Opener” (“Gerard the can opener was a dreamer. He wanted to open BIG things…), “The Discontented Dog”, “The Peanut Butter Thingie Who Sacrificed Himself So the Other Peanut Butter Thingies in the Box Could Live”, “The Son Who Failed to Reply”, and so on. These openings might prompt a smile, but, characteristically, once he has hooked you with that lightness, you notice Saunders leading you sentence by sentence into places you hadn’t expected. As a writer he never lets you lose the sense that while the short story is a place of uncanny make-believe, so is that voice in every mind that constructs the world in front of it, instant by instant.
One of his skills is as a master of internal monologue – at times he sounds like a kind of Alan Bennett of small-town America – conjuring unhinged realities in everyday vernacular. In A Thing at Work he flits between the streams of consciousness of an admin assistant, pocketing free office coffee sachets, and her boss, taking long lunches in hotel rooms with her favourite client. In Mother’s Day he moves between the self-justifying voices of a pair of aged women who meet on the street and the ancient history of the affair one had with the other’s husband. These stories are not only perfectly pitched; they come with enough comedy to have you grinning and enough empathy to suddenly stop you in your tracks.
Every human interaction is a morality tale, if you look at it hard enough, Saunders suggests. He makes that most overt in Love Letter, an email from grandfather to grandson, which concerns the question of whether the younger man should support a friend or lover in trouble with the authorities, apparently over an immigration question. The creeping authoritarianism of a Trump regime becomes the backdrop. Names become shorthand, for fear of a listening state – “R. & K.’s take on this: a person is “no patriot” if he refuses to answer a “simple question” from his own “homeland government” – as the subtleties of three generations of American courage and American complacency are gently turned over.
The longest tale here, the title story, is a kind of primer in the possibilities of Saunders’s worlds. It is set in a dystopian near-future, in which, it appears, certain individuals have been enslaved and reprogrammed to act as storytellers for “the Company”. They inhabit scenes from the past, for their owners’ enjoyment, in this case The Battle of Little Big Horn. You start off, as Saunders establishes the rules of this place, perhaps, thinking “too tricksy”, but within a couple of pages the tricks are utilised in all sorts of provocative and human ways, like watching a juggler tell you the saddest tale you have ever heard. Here is how one of the “pinioned Speakers” describes the re-enaction of Custer’s last stand: “Mr U. unfolds the Timeline Chart that came with the Mod, binder-clips it across two music stands. Turns out, he is a whiz at Shaping: at Shaping who Speaks what facts, for how long and in what order…” Mr U is a man after George Saunders’s own heart.
• 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
