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So right before I left Portland, during the flurry of "Farewell Pete" activities (I only lived there for three months, but did manage to makes some friends, some of whom I imagine I will in fact stay friends with. I've been describing the experience of living there as something like going to camp (although I myself never went to the kind of summer camp that lasted all summer), except that I was the only one in Portland that was at camp. I've tried to extend the analogy by saying that its like going to camp, except that I only made friends with counselors that are there year-round, but that's not quite right either.) I managed to read George Saunders' most recent collection of short stories (2006), In Persuasion Nation. Based on these stories, it seems altogether reasonable that he got that genius grant (see our discussion here).

Most of the stories take place in a sci-fi near-future where corporate media and advertising has gotten more perversely pervasive thanks to some additional technologies. Characters now have implants that cause pop-up ads to appear in their periphery when they see certain trigger objects, and are accosted by the police when they ignore them.

One of the most notable aspects of these stories is the kind of dumbed-down language that the characters speak in. Its certainly a trendy idea these days - the notion that instant messaging and text messaging on cell phones is killing our language. My sense of this problem (again, probably the influence of Pinker should be explicitly stated) is that its not that big of an issue - language changes with time, you know, and in literature (do to it being all language-y) there's this inflated fear that without the right words we won't be able to say as much as we can say now. But really the utterance "l8r" seems to me to carry just as much information as "I will see you again later." or even "See you later." Its certainly data compression, but the semantic content is left intact. When it comes time to say things like "I was in this prematurely air-conditioned supermarket..." we will still have to resort to saying "I was in this prematurely air-conditioned supermarket..."

Saunders is often (on his book flaps) compared with Pynchon and Vonnegut. The science fiction-y stories definitely pull him closer to the Vonnegut side of the spectrum - their pretty clear cut satires, much in the model of the kind of Vonnegut stories you might read in Welcome to the Monkey House. However, I think the weird language of Saunders' characters keep us even more distanced from them then we are already just as a facet of reading satire. The title story from Pastoralia is without a doubt one of the finest short stories I've ever read - I think it just gets "it" right, but there is a certain distance kept from the central character.

What I'm trying to get at: the Saunders stories are good, but very few of the characterizations were resonant for me. I think his over-focus on the inevitably stupid language of the near-future, while working well with his already-established style, makes it hard to feel much humanity in the stories. Maybe that's the point. But in the stories where the morals are more obvious, the moralizing gestures fall flat because we don't believe in the characters as fully as we might.