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A review by tasharobinson
Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders
2.0
This is the most depressing anthology I've ever read. In an afterward, George Saunders talks about its unintended, unanticipated theme about wondering why everyone's so eager to kick someone when they're down — a theme that may have come from where he was in life when he started writing these stories. But that theme is so pronounced here that any one given story is a misery, and reading a series of them all at once feels like reading the same dark joke over and over and over.
All the themes that define Saunders' more recent (and at least slightly more hopeful) work have their early origins here: dystopias, theme parks, dystopian theme parks, underclasses and overclasses with little dividing them, massive wealth disparity, hapless protagonists who often don't realize how horrible and unfair their lives are, and just roll numbly with blow after blow after blow. In these stories, though, it's hard to see how anyone has time for basics like eating, sleeping, or working, given how much time they devote to abusing the protagonists, who literally just stagger from one violent, abusive, degrading moment to the next.
Here's a 400-pound raccoon-disposal guy whose entire office spends all day, every day loudly mocking his weight and setting him up for humiliation. Here's a 90-something museum worker whose superiors and co-workers are all out to get her, and she has no recourse because she's old. Here's a broken-down VR specialist who hates himself because the last thing he said to his wife before she died was shitty. Here's a mutant in a polluted, post-apocalyptic world where mutants can be bought and sold. They all deal with the same pompous, speech-making bosses, with societies that sneer at them and loved ones who abuse or neglect them. Saunders' later short stories at least offer some pyrrhic victories or chances for noble self-sacrifice, but most of these stories end by petering out hopelessly, with protagonists being murdered, attempting suicide, or in one case winding up in jail, being raped daily.
There's a surprising amount of casual rape in these stories: gang rape, prison rape, marital rape, rape of a teenager with a vegetable that gives her a venereal infection. Over and over, there are women who willingly degrade themselves in sexually abusive relationships, mostly so male protagonists can feel even more downtrodden because the objects of their affection are giving themselves away to the wrong men. It's treated lightly most of the time, almost as a punchline — Saunders' grim sense of humor is in full swing here. It which reminds me more than anything of Candide, and the way its characters sail naïvely through an endless series of abuses.
I've never had this reaction to Saunders' work before, even though the modern stuff is also dark and dystopic — maybe because his style became so much more exploratory and playful, maybe because his endings veered in the direction of victims at least trying to change broken systems instead of bucking them and failing them. Clearly some people here found this book delightful. Personally, I just feel like I dragged myself through a gauntlet of cynical miserabilism with a sticker that says "a testament to the resilience of the human spirit!" hastily slapped on it. I'm glad Saunders found ways to lighten up and vary this exact same kind of story, but after this one, I'm going to need a long break from his work.
All the themes that define Saunders' more recent (and at least slightly more hopeful) work have their early origins here: dystopias, theme parks, dystopian theme parks, underclasses and overclasses with little dividing them, massive wealth disparity, hapless protagonists who often don't realize how horrible and unfair their lives are, and just roll numbly with blow after blow after blow. In these stories, though, it's hard to see how anyone has time for basics like eating, sleeping, or working, given how much time they devote to abusing the protagonists, who literally just stagger from one violent, abusive, degrading moment to the next.
Here's a 400-pound raccoon-disposal guy whose entire office spends all day, every day loudly mocking his weight and setting him up for humiliation. Here's a 90-something museum worker whose superiors and co-workers are all out to get her, and she has no recourse because she's old. Here's a broken-down VR specialist who hates himself because the last thing he said to his wife before she died was shitty. Here's a mutant in a polluted, post-apocalyptic world where mutants can be bought and sold. They all deal with the same pompous, speech-making bosses, with societies that sneer at them and loved ones who abuse or neglect them. Saunders' later short stories at least offer some pyrrhic victories or chances for noble self-sacrifice, but most of these stories end by petering out hopelessly, with protagonists being murdered, attempting suicide, or in one case winding up in jail, being raped daily.
There's a surprising amount of casual rape in these stories: gang rape, prison rape, marital rape, rape of a teenager with a vegetable that gives her a venereal infection. Over and over, there are women who willingly degrade themselves in sexually abusive relationships, mostly so male protagonists can feel even more downtrodden because the objects of their affection are giving themselves away to the wrong men. It's treated lightly most of the time, almost as a punchline — Saunders' grim sense of humor is in full swing here. It which reminds me more than anything of Candide, and the way its characters sail naïvely through an endless series of abuses.
I've never had this reaction to Saunders' work before, even though the modern stuff is also dark and dystopic — maybe because his style became so much more exploratory and playful, maybe because his endings veered in the direction of victims at least trying to change broken systems instead of bucking them and failing them. Clearly some people here found this book delightful. Personally, I just feel like I dragged myself through a gauntlet of cynical miserabilism with a sticker that says "a testament to the resilience of the human spirit!" hastily slapped on it. I'm glad Saunders found ways to lighten up and vary this exact same kind of story, but after this one, I'm going to need a long break from his work.