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How to get along is no small thing
A complex yet illuminating style marks George Saunders' latest.
By Angie Drobnic Holan, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007
Wise, goofy, compassionate and thrilling - that sums up the work of George Saunders, a fiction writer who deserves more fame than he's gotten. Saunders' unique aesthetic carries over to his first book of journalism, The Braindead Megaphone, where he reports on illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the awesome greed and friendliness of international tourism in Dubai, and a meditating teenager in Nepal. Saunders writes about American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, quixotically, the young adult classic Johnny Tremain. His conception of narrative is as complex as a difficult fiction writer like David Foster Wallace, but his own writing style is marvelously direct, much like that of Kurt Vonnegut, whom he praises as a model. He describes Vonnegut's books as a sort of black box that readers enter. "The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some resemblance to 'real life.' What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit." The nontrivial thing that happens with Saunders is we contemplate the big question he's trying to answer, something along the lines of, How are human beings supposed to live in the world? The final piece is a tongue-in-cheek press release from the organization People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction: "At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place." He concludes: "We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail." Angie Drobnic Holan is a Times news researcher. The Braindead Megaphone By George Saunders Riverhead, 242 pages, $14
[Last modified October 3, 2007, 15:49:30]
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