Double vision

Writer George Saunders on theme parks, bitchy opinions and staying in his end of the pool

When I pick up the phone to call George Saunders, I’m kind of nervous. Saunders is one of the most interesting and intelligent writers working today. His writing strikes a near perfect balance; it’s clever and witty, satirical without being mean, imaginative without being gimmicky. The man’s a genius, really. In 2006, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly referred to as the “genius award.”

I reach him at his home in Syracuse, New York, where he teaches creative writing in the MFA program. He’s immediately warm and funny and tells me, in an excited, Chicago accent, that his trip to Montreal, where he’ll be reading at Concordia, will be his first to the city.

“When I was a kid, I was a big Chicago Blackhawks fan and the Canadiens were our arch rivals. I had this image of Montreal as this city of imposing hockey players,” he says.

Best known for his short fiction collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation, Saunders originally worked as an engineer before becoming a writer. “I grew up in a working class part of Chicago and it seemed respectable, like a manly thing to do. After college, I went to go work in the oil business in Sumatra and I was out there for four weeks on, two weeks off, and during those four weeks, we were stuck in the jungle with nowhere to go, so I would bring a bunch of books with me.”

“I guess, at some point during that Asian thing, I realized I wasn’t cut out to do any kind of corporate, respectable work and started to get that desire to write. It was kind of a gradual shift, probably from being so incompetent at that, it pushed me over to writing.”

Consumerism and corporate culture are recurring themes in his fiction, but another, less serious motif also crops up in his work; theme parks. Ridiculous, over the top theme parks that have less to do with rollercoasters than with the dawn of man. “A lot of that has to do with my personality because I don’t really like criticizing anything or anybody—I have a lot of critical, probably even bitchy opinions—but I can’t attribute them to me. So if you invent a parallel world, then you can let them play out the way they feel, without actually hurting anybody’s feelings.”

I find this surprising. His most recent publication, The Braindead Megaphone, is a collection of essays in which he gives his opinion on everything from the dumbing-down of the media to Bush-era politics, Dubai’s heaven-like qualities and the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s an eclectic and often insightful collection, one he seems slightly uncomfortable with. “Since the book came out, I’ve withdrawn from big thinking like that. I’m writing fiction and trying to stay in my end of the pool,” he laughs.

But even when he is presented with what could be considered an easy target, his approach is respectful and even-keeled. In “The Great Divider,” which originally appeared in GQ, he makes members of the Minuteman Project, an anti-immigration group, seem, well, kind of nice.

“I was with about 12 of those guys, and at that number, they’re fine, but you put them together….in my mind, I can see a link between that and full-blown fascist, right-wing action. So it’s a little scary. I’m always torn between looking at the individual and kind of being fond of them and looking at the group. If you sat down with a Nazi in 1939, you’d probably find something nice to say. I have double vision about everything.”

In his fiction, this double vision allows him to create characters who are both lousy and sympathetic, spineless but loveable.

Just before the end of the interview, I ask what he’s working on, if he’s writing anything longer, like maybe a novel. “Short fiction’s sort of like one of those wind-up toys, you wind it up and it goes under the couch. When you look at a body of work by Chekhov or Alice Munro, it’s actually more accurate of what it’s like to live in the real world because who keeps the same mindset for 300 pages?”

GEORGE SAUNDERS READS AT
THE DE SÈVE CINEMA (1400 DE
MAISONNEUVE W.) AS PART OF
CONCORDIA’S WRITERS READ
SERIES THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 23, 7:30 P.M.