bonus book review: in persuasion nation, by george saunders

(Since I took last week off, I thought I'd throw a bonus book review your way today to make up for it. And aren't you all-a-quiver!)

Last week I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was supposed to have spent my summer tracking down supplementary readings for a unit on media manipulation, but as of two days before my due date I hadn't found one single thing. Honestly, I hadn't even bothered to try. In short, I was screwed. Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue by suggesting In Persuasion Nation, a collection of short stories by George Saunders, and it proved perfect for my needs. (And thank God I can read a book in a day. Way to cut things close, me.) I wasn't planning on reviewing this book since I read it for work, however I really enjoyed it, and so what the heck - we're mixing work with pleasure over here today.

The cover of In Persuasion Nation depicts a man leaning over to sniff the solitary flower standing in the center of a wasteland - an appropriate image for a collection of stories whose protagonists are often searching for something real, pure and true in a plastic world that values consumerism over humanity. Often humorous, rather quirky and usually disturbing, Saunders' stories serve as a sort of protest of our corporate culture, warning what we very well may one day become if we choose to continue on our current path. The heroes in these stories are the misfits of this modern world. There's Brad, whose life is a sitcom which he is in danger of being written off of once he finds he can no longer continue smiling along with the laugh track, ignoring the world's ills. In the title story, an army of frustrated characters from smug television commercials rise up and refuse to continue being humiliated while hawking Ding-Dongs, Mac and Cheese and Doritos. And, in what I thought was the best story of the lot, there's Jon, an orphan who's spent nearly his entire life as a member of a product focus group, knowing no other way of communicating his feelings but through advertisements.

While some of these stories succeed better than others, the overall collection proves timely, affecting, inventive and highly entertaining. Like the best satirists, Saunders is thought-provoking, but with heart. Fans of Vonnegut and Pynchon should approve.

In Persuasion Nation

George Saunders

2006 (paperback), 228 pages

monday book review: an arsonist's guide to writers' homes in new england, by brock clarke

Sam Pulsifer begins his faux-memoir with an explanation: he’s a convicted murderer, arsonist, and not much of a literature fan. Sam is also a “bumbler,” and I suppose that accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House and killing the two people still inside was his ultimate bumble. For his crime, Pulsifer serves ten years in a white-collar prison, and upon release discovers he is widely reviled by the denizens of his hometown of Amherst, MA, explaining "...in the Massachusetts Mt. Rushmore of big, gruesome tragedy, there are the Kennedys, and Lizzie Borden and her ax, and the burning witches of Salem, and then there's me." However, it appears that he is only mostly reviled. During his prison tenure, Sam's father had been inundated with a strange form of fan mail - folks offering him money in exchange for burning down other authors' homes: Hawthorne's, Twain's, Alcott's, and the like. Although surprised, Pulsifer refuses to see himself as an arsonist and chooses to ignore the letters, focusing instead on trying to build some semblance of a normal life by going off to college, getting married, buying a house, having a few kids, and staying the hell away from Amherst. But his reasonably happy existence is eventually shattered when, twenty years after his crime, the son of his accidental victims shows up on his doorstep seeking vengeance. His arrival sets off Pulsifer's downward spiral and sparks the mystery of who has resumed his work of burning down famous authors' homes, leaving Sam to assume the blame.

An Arsonist's Guide..., although fiction, reads like a memoir, and takes satirical jabs at memoirs, book clubs, English professors, and literary fads such as Harry Potter. It received gushing reviews from a wide variety of critics, and while it aims to be humorous, I felt it occasionally fell flat. Sam's (or, rather Clarke's) tone is strangely detached while telling his life story, and although this takes some getting used to, it does allow for certain passages to be funnier than they may have otherwise been. Take, for example, Sam's description of life in prison:

I learned something from everyone, is the point, even while I was fending off the requisite cell-block buggerer, a gentle but crooked corporate accountant at Arthur Anderson who was just finding his true sexual self and who told me in a cracked, aching voice that he wanted me - wanted me, that is, until I told him I was a virgin, which I was, and which, for some reason, made him not want me anymore, which meant that people did not want to sleep with twenty-eight-year-old male virgins, which I thought was useful to know.

See? It's that special brand of straight-faced humor that sometimes works for some people.

I could say more, but since these little reviews seem to get longer by the week, I'll just say that, overall, An Arsonist's Guide... is something that many English majors and book geeks just might love; however, although I am both those things, there was something about it - be it the tone, the wimpiness of the narrator, or the combination of the two - that kept me from feeling such depth of affection.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Brock Clarke
2007, 303 pages

books: then we came to the end

How you feel about short and sweet today? You know, 'cause I'm so short and so sweet?

Alright? Alright...

Lightening Quick Synopsis:
Told in the first person omniscient, Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris) is the collective story of the employees at a failing Chicago ad agency where increasing layoffs breed increasing paranoia, rumors, drama and obsessions over who has the better chair. Think Office Space meets Catch 22 meets The Virgin Suicides.

This book has been getting a fair amount of hype - positive reviews from the New York Times, a strong endorsement from Stephen King, and glowing praise from a plethora of other reviewers - but frankly, I just didn't see what the big deal was. Was it funny? Sure. Was it clever? Enough. Was it an engaging story? At times. But the best part came when the point-of-view shifted from the satirical collective to the singular voice of the boss - a lonely, work-obsessed, consummate professional who falls into a tailspin when facing a diagnosis of breast cancer. That section was honest, gripping, and generally unputdownable. However, as a whole, the use of the first person omniscient - although achieving the desired anonymously detached voice - tended to annoy me a bit, the characters were largely stereotypes, and despite the aforementioned exception of the boss' character I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of them.

So overall, it wasn't bad. It just wasn't great.

Up Next: What is the What, by Dave Eggers

books: god is dead

God is Dead is Ron Currie Jr.'s literary debut. In it, he poses a rather interesting question: how would the world change if there was irrefutable proof that God didn't exist? In order to explore this he begins by literally killing God, who came to Earth in the body of a young Dinka woman but is soon killed by the Janjaweed in the Sudan. The news quickly gets out that God is dead and the world reacts: priests commit suicide, people begin to find new things to worship such as their children and the feral dogs who ate God's corpse, and wars are waged over philosophical camps rather than religious affiliations.

I had been warned that this book - which is really more of a collection of short stories rather than a novel - would be depressing, however I didn't really find it to be such. Instead, it was a very darkly humorous satire, with Currie clearly finding inspiration in Kurt Vonnegut. In fact, there were several moments that made me laugh out loud, such as when Colin Powell, who's suffering from a crisis of conscience, begins to verbalize his disgust with President Bush, calling him a "silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker." But between these moments of dark humor, Currie continues to keep his subject serious - how would we react if we knew that there was no God, thus no consequences, no purpose and nothing to believe in? In the chapter titled "Interview With the Last Remaining Member of the Feral Dog Pack Which Fed on God's Corpse," the dog puts it more eloquently than I ever could:

"I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. You're as naked and alone in the this world as you were before finding me. And so now the question becomes: Can you abide by this knowledge? Or will it destroy you, empty you out, make you a husk among husks?"

And seeing how events unfold in the book, let's all hope that's a question that never needs answering.

Up Next: Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell