The Sick and the Dead

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 12 09:07:31 CDT 2006


Scotland on Sunday
Sun 11 Jun 2006
The sick and the dead
JACKIE MCGLONE

THE day I meet American satirist George Saunders, a
piece by him is published in The New Yorker. The
narrator of 'Nostalgia' realises, while watching a sex
scene on TV, that he has "become a prude": "I'm old. I
came of age in a simpler sexual time." The joke
escalates as the storyteller's nostalgia increases:
"Back in those ancient prelapsarian days,
'girl-on-girl' hadn't even been invented yet. At that
time, girl-on-guy had only recently been discovered."

I tell Saunders, whose short stories have been
compared to "Kafka trapped in a Jerry Springer
universe", that I laughed out loud at 'Nostalgia'. He
thanks me, but looks worried. He read it a few days
ago at an author event and several members of the
blue-rinse brigade in the audience got up and left
while he was in full flight.

"They were clearly shocked," says the former
geophysical engineer. "I realised I need to re-think
the way I write, because obviously I'm not getting
through to some people - and these are people who buy
books, who read a lot. But, you know, I'll be reading
my early stories to a crowd, and if I haven't read
them in a while even I am often struck by how sick
they are."

Yet the New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani,
enthuses that Saunders "writes like the illegitimate
offspring of Nathaniel West and Kurt Vonnegut". And
his dystopian vision, allied with a gift for
disturbing humour, has won him many admirers,
including Thomas Pynchon ("an astoundingly tuned
voice") and Michel Faber ("a frightening talent")....

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/review.cfm?id=858612006

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