A review by markeefe
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

3.0

Having come to George Saunders's first collection of stories after reading all his subsequent works, this book is slightly underwhelming. Saunders has developed immensely as a writer, but in ways that are pretty subtle. In CivilWarLand, he lays out the themes and styles that would carry him through Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December, but his execution wasn't as deft as it would become. He relied overly much on the "wouldn't it be darkly comic if this story were set in a weird theme park?" motif. And, in many of the stories, the characters feel a little cartoonish and flat. Now, these criticisms are all by comparison to his later work, which, retrospectively, sets a pretty high bar for the young Saunders. How can he compete with the writer he would eventually become? Today, he's mastered all of these early hitches to his approach. All that being said, there's plenty of good stuff to be found in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading anything by such a fertile and unique mind. But I would do so with this caveat: it only gets better from here.