The World According to George Saunders
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Our world is stranger than fiction—but not George Saunders’ fiction. After the runaway success of his only novel (Lincoln in the Bardo) and the rousing popularity of his essays on craft (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), the godfather of the contemporary short story returns to the form that made him a literary heavyweight in Liberation Day, out this week. Saunders’ first collection of short fiction in nearly a decade reminds us of his uncanny talents for satire, comedy, and sublime absurdity—just wait until you meet Gerard the sentient can opener, “a dreamer” who “wanted to open BIG things.”
The nine stories contained within Liberation Day return us to Saunders’ richly imagined worlds, each one painted in varying shades of lightness and darkness. In one memorable story set in a near-future police state, a grandfather explains how Americans lost their freedoms through small concessions to an authoritarian government. In another standout, vulnerable Americans are brainwashed and reprogrammed as political protestors, with their services available to the highest bidder. Writing political fiction, Saunders tells Esquire, has forced him to “personify and particularize” his own belief system. Meanwhile, the unforgettable title novella sees the poor enslaved to entertain the rich, forced to recreate scenes from American history like the Battle of Little Bighorn. In these powerful and perceptive stories, Saunders conjures a nation in moral and spiritual decline, where acts of kindness wink through like lights in the darkness.
In a world getting weirder every day, Saunders' stories are the medicine we need. As the author tells us, “I always assumed that the point of someone telling you a story was to help you live better.” Saunders Zoomed with Esquire to take us inside his creative process, opening up about everything he knows after decades of writing fiction—and everything that’s still a magical mystery. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
ESQUIRE: This is your first book of short fiction in nearly a decade. How has the way you write short stories and think about short stories changed in that time?
George Saunders: The honest answer is mostly, it just changes on its own throughout the process, and my job is to let those changes get into the stories. I'm a big fan of intuition and the idea that you don't really have to plan it or worry about it; you only have to approve it and bless it. But having said that, after I wrote A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, it really affected things. I became aware of the way those Russian stories worked by sub-contradiction. You start on a certain path with Chekhov and he knows where you're going, so he anticipates and then diverts. That process repeats and repeats, then by the end, you're left looking at him like, "What am I supposed to believe?" And he's like, "Exactly. See you later." That opened a door in my mind; it helped me believe that a story doesn't have to be a coherent system of advice or belief. It's actually a way for the reader to enact a process of becoming both more unsure and more in love with things like that. In a way, you're leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow.
I went back and revisited our conversation about A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. At the time, you said, "I've been trying to think that whatever the pandemic is teaching me will come out eventually." Has that thing come up in any of these stories in Liberation Day?
“Ghoul” was like that. I set myself a challenge to write something in the voice of “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” then this thing tumbled out. I really wasn't sure what it was about. At some point later in the editing process, I read it and realized, "Oh, it’s about the feeling of being somebody who’s just had the rug pulled out from under him." There was some trace of the pandemic in there—in the confusion about a lot of truths that turned out to be more wobbly than I knew.
I'd say all of the stories written during or after the pandemic had some element of, "Shit, I don't know what's going on," which is really a good position for a fiction writer to be in. It’s important not to be too certain or too confident. The writer’s job is to make things solid—to make an undeniable trail of breadcrumbs so that the reader knows they’re going through something intentional. That's 99% of the job, and it doesn’t presume you'd know where you're leading the reader. You can make a piece better and better without ever really defining what you mean by better. It just gets more substantial. It gets more like itself. With a piece of fiction, once you do that, you know something's going to happen to the reader, but you really don't know what. So it's always interesting this phase when people say, "Oh, here's what it did to me." And you're like, "Oh, good."
In “Liberation Day,” of all the historical episodes that the characters could be called upon to reenact, why Custer’s Last Stand?
I'll give you the writer's answer: it's something I knew about. I've been reading about it for thirty years. I remember feeling that the story needed a more substantial scenario, and I just thought, "What have I got?" I had that Custer stuff, which I was squirreling away for a novel, but I knew I didn't really want to write a whole novel about Custer. So I said to myself, "Let’s take a leap of faith. Just drop it in there." You put it in there almost as a dare to yourself: can you make these two storylines start talking to each other? That becomes the revision work. So honestly, it was just a whim. That kind of playfulness can be hard to pull off sometimes, but unless I play at the beginning, the good stuff doesn't happen later.
To your point about how the reader makes the meaning, I kept wrestling with the story and thinking, "It must be about a continuum of exploitation." It’s always funny to hear that what seems like a deliberate choice is actually a practical one.
The funny thing is, I noticed that too. About three quarters of the way through, I thought, "Okay, that's happening. Good." But the advantage of this playful method is that things fit unevenly. You can read it that way, but it's not the only interpretation. During the revision process, you say, "These two storylines are roughly tracking. Is there anything I can do on the line level to make them track a little more warmly?" You want them to shoot sparks back and forth.
“Liberation Day” and “Ghoul” both call back to “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” in many ways. All of these stories share themes of entertainment, performance, and artifice. What keeps you coming back to that space?
My most honest answer is that I just have fun in that mode. I know what to do. I can think up jokes and examples; there's a feeling of overabundance in that mode. The first gate you come to as a writer is that you might want to write about X, but if your mind goes, "Ugh," then it's not going to work. Whereas you might say, "I don't want to write about tap-dancing." But when you start to write about tap-dancing, it comes alive. The story and your subconscious are telling you something. The act of faith is to say, "Okay, I'll write the tap-dancing novel." If you honor that initial energy, the depths will come to you.
In other words, the artifice is fun and easy for me to write. When I write it long enough, it starts to tell me things about our culture that I didn't know. When I was writing this book, it struck me that when forces come for your freedom, nowadays, they do it with charm. The Nazis and the fascists were brutal and ran you right over. But these days, our freedom and our autonomy is being undercut with our own permission. It’s almost like the charm of that offense is what we have to actually learn to look out. I had a friend who said, "When the fascists come next time, they're going to leave the jackboots at home."
“Love Letter” first ran in The New Yorker two and a half years ago. That story feels very much like a product of its moment, but since then, so much cultural and political upheaval has happened. When you look back on that story now, how do you feel about it?
I was a bit nervous about coming back to it, though even if you take Trump out of the equation, it still holds up. The authoritarian impulse is worldwide right now. I think one of the reasons it holds up is because even when I was writing it from a place of political agitation, I thought, "It still has to be a story." The story discusses how easy it is to imagine taking action, and how hard it is to actually do it, what with all the associated costs and how much courage it takes in a moment of political crisis. Some people can’t or don’t want to do that, and yet they still rationalize it. I wish conditions would change so that it was now completely irrelevant, but I don't think that's happened yet.
It's obviously a very political story. How are you feeling about political fiction these days? Do you think it has much value as a place to thrash out ideas or drive political conversation?
I think it does. A story is a place where politics takes off its stiff clothing and puts on some pajamas. You suddenly see that politics always shows up in people's lives. Fiction gives those people room to move around. It gives the writer a chance to show other dimensions of a person who might be reduced to a catchphrase. There's always room for politics in stories, but that’s where the skill comes in, because if it's just overt propaganda, fiction is very snobby about that. It doesn't want to be used as a vehicle for propaganda; it doesn't have the bone structure for it. It won't support it. Even if the writer has strong political beliefs, it forces you to personify and particularize them. In that process, I've always found my political beliefs not exactly softening, but becoming more intelligent. They're more empathetic and a little more patient. Reading a story that has an ostensibly political basis does the same thing.
Does inflecting the story with elements of genre or non-realism help you get to that place? I often think about Doris Lessing saying, “Science fiction is some of the best social fiction.”
Yes. That’s a brilliant observation of hers. I find that if I start a story knowing the message I want to give you, then we're both asleep in ten minutes. I just can’t do it. I think it's because I'm too opinionated and probably too facile of a political thinker—I'm just your typical 63-year-old liberal dude. If I know what I'm trying to say, it's not good, but at the same time, it's hard to start a story without some intention. If I just say, "It’s a world where everyone can levitate,” that distracts my creative mind enough that I'm then trying to figure out, "So if everybody can levitate, how do you play hockey? You’d have to have a weight that would bring you down to earth." Meanwhile, my deeper concerns are still percolating, and they always find a way to get into the story. The best first step for me is to say, "Okay, it's a theme park about hell." Then the sensible part of me says, "Well, I'll try to make sense of it." And then, something can surprise me.
Isn’t this the great joy of fiction? You can start with a wild premise like a theme park about hell, but you always bring yourself to it, sooner or later.
Exactly right. Wherever you go, there you are. I think as people, we're used to having us with us, and then cloaking ourselves in certain protective measures as we go out into the world. But when you put in some crazy element, that part goes askew and suddenly you're still there, but you're projecting onto a completely unknown surface, which is very refreshing. As you get older, it becomes more of a challenge. Hardening into yourself is a real drag.
You mentioned this last time we spoke—the challenge of fighting your instincts.
It’s a constant challenge. You believe that by now you should have some degree of mastery, and that's the absolute worst. That's how you end up being a hack. When you were 25, you knew you weren't any good, and you knew you didn't know how to be good, so you were blundering around. I think readers love that. They love the feeling of somebody who's willing to make a fool of themselves and willing to blurt out things they might regret. I think we look to our writers for that.
I know someone who calls this “the magic dark”—that sense of blundering around before you make a big discovery.
Yes. That's beautiful. Because then when you do it, it's amazing, and often you do it in a moment of intuition that surprises even you. The reader gets lifted up on that gust of delight. I think that's why people like improv music or improv comedy, because you can see somebody shocking the hell out of themselves. You could say that craft in the long view is knowing what’s true and then engineering situations where it's likely to happen. But with age and experience, it becomes a more challenging thing to say, "I didn't even realize I'm in a rut. How do I get out of it?"
“The Mom of Bold Action” has such a playfulness about children's book tropes. Would you ever write another children’s book?
I wrote the one and I loved it, but they're actually really hard. They're as hard as poetry. I’ve started some things every now and then, but I don't know. Maybe if the grandkids come. It’s a demanding form—it really has to be crisp and tight. The other thing I’ve found is that you're obligated to console. In a story for adults, part of your job is to deconsole. With a children’s book, you have to say, "Well, you're in for a big adventure, kid. It might be hard, but ultimately it's going to be beautiful." For a writer like me, the challenge is, how do you make a legitimate and earned happy ending? My mind climbs to the dark, into the catastrophic. Maybe someday, if I become more morally developed, I can do another one.
“The Mom of Bold Action,” “Liberation Day,” and “Ghoul” all share a fascination with justice. How were you thinking about that theme as you worked through these stories?
I don't think I was overtly thinking about it. The way “The Mom of Bold Action” proceeds for me is that it's a process of identifying your own bullshit as you're writing and then correcting it. In that story, we know that something has happened to the kid. If I look back at my books, I'm always throwing some kid under the bus because it's a simple moral construction. Put a kid near a cliff and you’ve got a story. Then you self correct and you say, "It's just an old guy weirdly pushing him into a bush. He seems fine, but it's a shitty thing to do." Then you get into a situation where the guy’s been caught, and your mind goes, "What’s next?" You say, "This is becoming a Law & Order episode and I don't want to do that." The story becomes about justice. But honestly, in the execution, it's just trying to keep the stove hot—trying to not do the predictable thing. I guess you could say trying to put the mother in a more precise mess. Then you look up and you go, "This story is actually about justice. What would be justice in this situation?" The storytelling method always causes the story to be about something. That’s your goal—make it about something. If it turns out to be justice, great.
A few of the stories in this collection are rather sentimental stories. I mean that in the best sense of the term, but “sentimental” is a world that's often been stigmatized, especially in art. What do you feel is the place of sentimentality in literature?
I have an old definition of sentimentality, which is that it’s to be avoided because it works on unearned emotion. You don't want to do that because that's cheap. But sentiment, emotion—I'm a big believer that this is the highest level of storytelling. What I'm really saying is you and I, two different people separated by all kinds of things—isn't it amazing that we can both come together at a moment in a story and go, "Yeah, God. Life's like that." That's a stunning thing, and it does happen. It’s a high aspiration to say, "I'm going to assume that the reader thinks and feels and lives very much like I do. No matter who they are, I'm going to bank on that. I'm going to tell a story that assumes that."
That’s where sentimentality gets dangerous, because sometimes you take a shortcut and you put in a sick puppy. You get everybody, but there's something not quite fair about that. If you can spark a mutual earned emotion, I think that's really lovely. One of the gifts of having done this for awhile is that you realize this is really is what people are there for. When you're younger, you just want to be edgy. You don't want to be mistaken for a sentimentalist or a Hallmark person. But as you get older, you think, “Well actually, the great writers—that's what they have done.” Chekhov does this. Dickens does this. It's a feeling of saying, "I felt it, so the reader could feel it, like that."
“Sparrow” started out wanting to be a little dark and edgy and cruel. I remember the exact point where I thought, "Oh no, you're going to take this woman that you made up, who you've already pushed around, and you're going to deliver the death blow. No, I don't want to do that." Then aesthetically, you say, "Well, what else have you got? Do you know of any other possible outcomes?" In trying to find that, you discover a hidden part of yourself that’s actually quite optimistic. Do you have the guts to show it?
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