“I do not wish to disturb the happiness of our family. I have known these dear people all my life.” What a lovely sentiment, in this instance from Jeremy, the reprogrammed human slave “member” of the Untermeyer family, in the title story of George Saunders’ new collection Liberation Day. Opening the book, and comprising nearly a third of its length, Liberation Day is a wryly intelligent commentary on power and injustice in America, a prescient warning about where things might be headed in the not-too-distant future.
To say too much about the trajectory of the story would spoil Saunders’ originality, his artful world-building and linguistic flourishes, but rest assured that he creates a grotesquely believable future where poor or desperate people literally sign over their lives to the rich. Jeremy is an endearing narrator, in thrall to his owners, entirely trusting of their control over his life. Saunders mixes horror (capital letter Punishments, confinement in dark rooms) with mordant humour (Jeremy’s yearnings for Mrs U, an AI-symphony re-enactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn), lulling the reader into the dystopia, before switching gears to an even more subversive, complex finale.
The godlike figure of Mr U has echoes of AM Homes’ recent novel The Unfolding, which followed a group of white Republican bigwigs and their grand plans to take over America. Liberation Day propels us into a time where those plans have succeeded, where life for a rich white man is “a grand adventure, marked by frequent, almost predictable victories; dominion on every front; daily confirmation of his location at the centre of the universe”.
Four out of the nine stories in Saunders’ collection imagine new worlds, not too far from the present, all of them depressingly worse, yet searingly readable in their ingenuity and humanity. Saunders’ near future is not a good place to be an underdog, an outsider, or a dissenter. In Love Letter, a grandfather gives advice to his grandson on the dangers of helping a friend in trouble with an autocratic government. It is at once a moving story about generational bonds, a flash forward to a time where the state triumphs over the individual, and an exploration of how decent people sat by and did nothing as things got incrementally worse: “It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, something that had been with us literally every day of our lives.”
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Saunders is the author of 10 books, most recently the New York Times bestselling essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
With a similar premise to the opening story, Elliott Spencer sees underprivileged and vulnerable people reprogrammed to be used as tools in the culture wars. Occasionally these poor souls remember flashes of their former lives, which adds another level of torment to their experience: “Must be painful. To forget your mother existed, then remember she existed, then right away find out she’s all of a sudden dead?” Ghoul, meanwhile, is another off-kilter story, but its setting of a Hell-themed underground amusement park is thinly sketched and the characters seem more like cyphers to service the dark farce scenario. It’s worth saying though that such criticism is in part only by contrast to the rest of the collection, which is full of style, innovation and heart.
Saunders is the author of 10 books, most recently the New York Times bestselling essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. His debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the 2017 Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize.
His ability to move so fluidly between perspectives is one of the trademarks of his writing. Stories like Sparrow and A Thing At Work offer prismatic views of workplaces, the pettiness and rivalries, winners and losers, through the interior voices of characters whose plights are rendered with compassion and humour. Saunders is great on entitlement and power dynamics. His narrators — as with the parents in The Mom of Bold Action — are capable of monstrous thoughts and deeds in the name of love. The blurring of fantasy and reality is a recurring theme, as is the reach of the past into the present, most noticeably in the wonderful Mother’s Day, where a beleaguered daughter takes her ageing mother on a walk that manages to encapsulate wholes decades of neglect, regret and loss.
Finishing the collection is My House, a short, profound story about two men and a house, which unfolds to a commentary on pride and what it means to be alive. With multiple layers, tonal shifts and wise asides, it is Saunders at his best: “It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.”
