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It's a theme-park life
In George Saunders' savage, soulful satires, ordinary people face real crises in a disturbingly artificial America.
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Pastoralia By George Saunders Riverhead Books, 208 pages Fiction Also Today It's a theme-park life In George Saunders' savage, soulful satires, ordinary people face real crises in a disturbingly artificial America. By Chris Lehmann Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

So where does the savage satirical vision of Saunders' fiction come from? To the writer himself, the very fact that his work causes critics to use such words is somewhat puzzling. "They'd say, 'Oh, yes, very dark,' and I'd think, 'Hmm. I just thought they were funny.'" And, it turns out, Saunders' stories only seem exaggerated in their depiction of a merciless, downsized, corporatized and theme-parked America if you haven't walked in the author's shoes. The more Saunders told Salon about his employment history, the less fanciful his fiction seemed.

Tell me about your background.

I was raised in Chicago, in a lower-middle-class family. It wasn't the kind of environment where anyone was a writer or had the idea that you could be one. I read a lot, though. Kahlil Gibran. I liked Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand seems like a strange writer for someone like you, with your keen identification with the world's underdogs, to admire.

It was a teenage thing. I was kind of a nerdy guy and I liked the idea of being that kind of hero. I loved the extremes of it. One of the reasons why I went to the Colorado School of Mines is that I thought I had to be like Howard Roark. I wasn't scientifically minded though, so I had to work really hard.

Were you writing?

I was trying to write about things like convenience stores in the style of writers like Thomas Wolfe. There were a lot of "Os" in what I wrote then.

As in "O, the convenience store"?

Yeah. My daughter found a poem I wrote back then to some girl, written exactly like "The Prophet." And it was so hackneyed, so bad. Oh, God. But I loved that, loved those writers, but I couldn't make it work with the stuff around me.

And after you graduated?

I got a job working for the petroleum industry in Sumatra for a couple of years. The stuff I wrote about that was in the style of [Joseph] Conrad.

Working in Asia must have changed your perspective on how the world works.

Yeah. They had a big construction site on one of the streets there, Orchard Road, and the laborers were all these old women, lifting big rocks in their saris. Simultaneously I learned that there was oppression, but I also realized that my place back home was not exactly on the top either. It was one of those jobs where if I had kept my nose down I could have made a lot of money. But I read [Jack] Kerouac and so I decided that what I was doing, working for a big company, was selling out. And I got sick after swimming in a river so I had to go home. The petroleum market collapsed right after that.

You had a variety of jobs for a while then.

Yeah, I was a doorman in Beverly Hills, but at a cheapo condo that was kind of at the bottom rung of that sort of building. If there was a problem we were supposed to run up, unarmed, open the door and shout, "Security!" Kind of like "Shoot me!" And I worked in a slaughterhouse. I was knuckle-puller.

What's that?

A knuckle, I think, is part of a leg. Literally, it looked like a big chicken leg -- I couldn't see what part of a cow it could be. But there wasn't much time to look at it -- it was usually moving. There was one guy who'd been there for a while and he got the job where he'd sit on a stool all day, and he'd take this thing and put it on this hook that was on a conveyer belt. Then it would be moving around the room and you had to make cuts in it, and you have to do this while you're walking cross-legged. There was one part where you had to put a hook in and drop your whole weight on it. It was like wrestling all day. And it never stopped moving. If you were a little slow, the other guys would have to come and help you out. There were guys there who were very proud that they could do this really fast because they'd been doing it for 30 years, running around this room.

Eventually you applied to the creative writing program at Syracuse and got in.

That was really great. That's where I met my wife. We got married and had our first daughter, and I had to get a job.

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