Genius
Among other very smart type folks, short storyist (?) George Saunders has won himself a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant this year. Hooray for him: Pastoralia is a fantastic read, and I've enjoyed the bits of other things I've seen him write in the New Yorker and so forth. I should get around to reading more.
Saunders creates these fantastic side characters who speak in mealy-mouthed bureaucratic gobbeldygook, which succeeds both as language-type slapstick humor and moral-cowardice-type satire. It comes to mind now if I ever read transcripts of President Bush at press conferences.
Saunders creates these fantastic side characters who speak in mealy-mouthed bureaucratic gobbeldygook, which succeeds both as language-type slapstick humor and moral-cowardice-type satire. It comes to mind now if I ever read transcripts of President Bush at press conferences.
2 Comments:
Like so many talented writers currently operating in this country, Saunders comes off as a bit smug for my taste - I don't think he's explicitly associated with the McSweeney's set of talented-yet-somehow-totally-shitty writers - except that his sardonic wit is a marvelous thing. Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine was a second-rate rip-off of the "crap in my oatmeal" guy from that one Saunders story. Maybe, overall, though, through the short stories of Saunders that I've read is that he's a bit to snide or sarcastic or whatever for his own good.
This post reminds me of the time I saw Dan Choan give a reading - I had rather liked his collection of short stories that had at the time has just been published, but he read some Godawful "ghost" story 'cause it was around Halloween, and the story he read totally blew. I bet it had been published in McSweeney's.
I haven't read a lot from the McSweeney's set; haven't heard of Dan Choan, for example. "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" by Eggers might actually be about the only item I've got under my belt; but I did like that book a lot. And there the characters are left vulnerable enough that the writing doesn't seem smug. Certain elements of the book give off that Too Cool for School vibe -- like the first chapter starting on the front cover of the first edition, and the paperback edition interpolating a new chapter intended to pull the reader out of the narrative thread. (An interesting idea, but annoying in practice.) But there's no reason to harp on that when the story paces its plot & maintains an atmosphere so well.
Anyway, my feeling is that ironic distance is like any other literary ingredient: getting it right involves balancing it with your other themes & tones.
Greg Kinnear's Little Miss Sunshine character isn't a ripoff of the Saunders character. (That character is a failure; the Saunders character is not a failure, because his sadsack audience buys into what he says.) Also, it's not "crap in my oatmeal," it's "Who's been crapping in your oatmeal?"
Little Miss Sunshine is a great movie. Have you seen that yet, Nate?
Okay, I think I'm out of halfbaked critical arguments.
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