Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

Rating:
Summary: Many Stories The Same
Review: Saunders is a master of the idomatic chatter of everyday characters and their tortured inner monologues. Unfortunately, Civilwarland suffers in comparison to his much better and more recent collection Pastoralia.

The problem is that the settings for the stories in Civilwarland are all very similar, often set in marginal businesses and in jokey theme parks. Although Saunders gets the management-speak perfectly, it becomes wearing as each story is virtually the same in setting and tone.

As much as I love his style, I found this collection hard going. One reviewer here at Amazon has said that you should read one Saunders short story every month and that seems about right to me.

Rating:
Summary: funny, savage, absurd
Review: Saunders is an exciting writer, one of the bona fide bright spots in contemporary fiction. I love his take on consumer society; it is the perfect antidote to the Wal-Mart-Land we McLive in. And apparently, given the subject matter of his latest collection, he has the critique-of-consumerism-via-unlikely-theme-park domain all to himself. Like Pynchon and Barthelme, Saunders is not a realist, but rather an absurdist with a biting sense of humor. There is, as one reviwer notes, a certain sameness to these stories, but the same could be said about Melville's novels, Stevens's poems, or Bruckner's symphonies. I can't recommend Saunders more enthusiastically, but those who prefer realism should beware.

Rating:
Summary: Theme parks of the damned
Review: Saunders takes the misfits of society and places them in nightmare worlds of corporate double-speak, psychobabble and unthinkable tragedy. All the ills of our society become magnified in his visions, particularly in his novella, set in a United States where disease, pollution, prejudice and greed have done the work we thought the H-bomb would do. In most of these stories, the heros find some kind of redemption, even if it's the redemption to be found in death and the afterlife. A strangely Calvinistic look a the world. I couldn't put it down

Rating:
Summary: Moments of Genius
Review: Since reading Blackburn by Bradley Denton, I've been looking for a book that matches its thrilling dark humor. This isn't quite it, but it's close enough that I certainly wasn't disappointed. The way he strings words together can be genius! My favorite example is the title of one of the short stories: Downtrodden Mary and Her Failed Campaign of Terror. In each story I found passages that I simply *had* to read aloud. It's definitely worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Mankind in Bad Decline
Review: Some people will not like this book. Some people will be turned off by the title, the first sentence, the typeset. And that's okay.

William Butler Yeats predicts in his poem, "The Second Coming," that "things fall apart; the center cannot hold" when the apocalypse occurs. As a writer, George Saunders proves that these now post-apocalyptic and dystopic fragments of what life once was are closer than our society likes to imagine. His gluing together of the chaotic remains of America into his stories is both hysterical and chilling. Saunders pays particular attention to the casual nuances of everyday life, yet manages to bring universal flaws of mankind to the table. In Civilwarland in Bad Decline, he explores the defecating depths of human travesty by highlighting society's biggest travesties as well as man's most trivial imperfections.

Saunders is obviously fascinated by American society, and portrays its dystopic cousin in such a way that he embellishes our culture's flaws while transporting the reader to a near-future or alternate present. Though not completely cohesive throughout all of the stories in Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Saunders' version of America is grossly distorted. In the novella "Bounty," he fashions a country ripped apart its seams by mutant slavery, overtaken by corporate America, and devoid of any compassion. Yet, amidst this abnormal alternative universe, Saunders incorporates pop culture references such as Dr. Pepper, Playboy, and even a McDonald's, though it has since been occupied by a religious cult.

Saunders seems to enjoy writing characters with heavily flawed personalities, but he especially excels at describing their physical defects, allowing the reader to pick up on the satire without the aid of blunt accusations. In the story "Bounty," he creates a mutant race of imperfect people known as the Flaweds. Each Flawed has his or her own special defect, such as "Mollie, a hag whose Flaw is a colossal turkeyneck," or "Buddy who was born with no teeth and Mike who has twice as many as he needs." Saunders expresses the irony man's cyclical discrimination, this time focusing on physical differences, rather than religious, sexual or intellectual differences. This can be attributed to a society obsessed with outer beauty, striving to obtain beauty over brains.

Saunders is not the type of writer who wants to detail every shred of nightfall over the course of two pages. In fact, in "The 400-Pound CEO," he does it in two sentences: "Big clouds roll in. Birds light on the Dumpster and feed on substances caked on the lid." His images are often vulgar, jarring and imaginative. Saunders uses the English language like one would use a sports car around a mountain, working with the bumps and sharp turns along the way.

Saunders' dystopias are usually tarnished and overtaken completely by corporations and businesses that are meant to sustain themselves, not their employees. After a crazed worker shoots a boy in "Civilwarland", the narrator rationalizes why he "decided to leave the police out of it because of the possible bad PR . . . and that's that." Even sex is commercialized, and due to its institutionalization, "a safeOrgy fills you with longing and repulses you at the same time."

Saunders is a master of the failed, pathetic Everyman, as one narrates each story in Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Saunders' characters are difficult to like, but easier to relate to than most would feel comfortable admitting. Uncovering the honesty and universal wishes in these miserable characters make them particularly moving. It is unsettling to realize that one shares the same ultimate desires as the heavily flawed characters in alternate universe of such disarray.

"Is this the life I envisioned for myself? My God no," one character admits. Obviously, dystopias are not meant for everyone. While Saunders' writing is fresh and quirky, his stories should not be taken lightly: They are the post-apocalyptic fragments of today's society, just waiting to cave in when the center finally gives.

Rating:
Summary: A unique new voice
Review: Sure, there are precursors to George Saunders-Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Nathaniel West, to name a few. However, I find his voice to be one of the most unique in American literature today. The stories are, for the most part, extremely funny. Yet there is a sense of darkness and despair to be found lurking in each of them, and then the ending of each story seems to cleanse the darkness and leave the reader refreshed. I'd hate to call a work of literature cathartic, but somehow I feel like the stories in "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" almost are cathartic in a way. The stories have deeper resonances, but never come across as difficult or pretentious. In the case of George Saunders, it appears, we have a natural story-teller.

Rating:
Summary: A unique new voice
Review: Sure, there are precursors to George Saunders-Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Nathaniel West, to name a few. However, I find his voice to be one of the most unique in American literature today. The stories are, for the most part, extremely funny. Yet there is a sense of darkness and despair to be found lurking in each of them, and then the ending of each story seems to cleanse the darkness and leave the reader refreshed. I'd hate to call a work of literature cathartic, but somehow I feel like the stories in "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" almost are cathartic in a way. The stories have deeper resonances, but never come across as difficult or pretentious. In the case of George Saunders, it appears, we have a natural story-teller.

Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi for people who hate Sci-Fi
Review: That's a little reductive, I know, but that's what I kept thinking while reading this great collection. Sometimes it's something akin to sci-fi, sometimes it's more like magic realism, but the stuff that goes on in these stories is always a refreshing departure from the norm of contemporary fiction. Lovers of Pynchon and David Foster Wallace should eat this up, but in some ways I felt, especially in this collection, that Saunders has more in common with Samuel Beckett. But here Sauders comments on the endurance of the human condition with civil war-era ghosts, morbidly obese office drones, post-apocalyptic mutants. I used to think this kind of subject matter would always be relegated to "guilty pleasures" status, but Saunders treats it with an intelligence absent in pulpier fare.

Rating:
Summary: One Tricky Pony
Review: The stories are more like variations on a theme: near future, backdrop of unexplained environmental disaster and collapsing social infrastructure, stories take place in bizarre disneyland operations (civilwarland being one of them, with a fake Erie canal), almost uniformly depressing. "The 300-lb CEO" and the novella "Bounty" are the most interesting works here; the rest of the stories read like warmups.

Rating:
Summary: What drugs was this guy on?
Review: The stories were boring and terse. I think he was hitting the ... and making the ... up as he went along. The 400lb CEO was supposed to be the best story in the bunch and it was weak. I did not finish this book.