Dear Friends,
I’m sharing New(ish) Books. These — for people just joining this Substack — are less conventional book reviews and more free-ranging discussions of the underlying ideas of a recent book. These typically feature one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction.
Best,
Sam
GEORGE SAUNDERS’ Liberation Day (2022)
Let’s be honest. I picked up Liberation Day looking to pan it — and that’s still my intention! — although that comes with a few caveats.
The main caveat is that Saunders really is an extraordinary writer. He’s been one of these generation-defining figures — and, whenever that happens, there’s always some reason or other for it. In Saunders’ case, he essentially figured out how to write animation in print. His characters are never exactly real people, but they do have big and easily-broken hearts and the pliable emotional range of animated figures. And animation, of course, has its advantages — it’s easy to be funny in animation, easy to constantly toy with the rules of one’s fictional universe, easy (and this is Saunders’ real art) for fiction to serve as a kind of funhouse mirror for the more deranged aspects of the culture at large.
But a pan I intended to write and a pan this shall be. Saunders is one of these people I’m just opposed to on principle. Part of it is that he’s crossed over into a different kind of cultural category, quotes of his appear on tote bags and coffee cups; he’s taken on a self-appointed role as everybody’s favorite beatnik uncle (the post held at one time by George Carlin); and his output has conspicuously slowed in the period of time that he’s turned into a living monument. (It’s worth noting, as part of the case against Saunders, that “the best short-story writer in English” — as a blurb on the back of Liberation Day matter-of-factly proclaims — hasn’t actually published a short story collection in a decade.)
But the more trenchant case against Saunders has to do with the school of writing that’s been created in his wake. My belief is that a famous writer isn’t just responsible for themselves; they’re responsible for their imitators as well. And if Hemingway has to answer for Eugene Burdick and Pynchon for Richard Powers, Saunders, as the literary laureate of our era, has to be held to account for an affectless, bloodless, twee style, in which all characters seem to be about six inches tall and speak in baby voices (it’s become the house style of, for instance, The New Yorker’s ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ feature). The great
— although trying to be professionally civil — took on Saunders in a post on her Substack. She recalled a college class she co-taught with Saunders in which she discussed the importance of paying attention to the physical world around oneself, and Saunders suddenly burst out, “Like anybody does that? Who looks out the window and thinks about trees? Only people in books do that.” Gaitskill was shocked by Saunders’ reaction — and I am as well. It seemed to be such an outrageous dismissal of realism and of all the sorts of reasons that make people want to be writers in the first place (engaging with the actual world they inhabit). It was as if Saunders had found one particular trick — the cartoon ‘reality’ of his fiction — and believed that that deracinated, post-modern construct could stand in for the rest of literature. We don’t mind that so much with Saunders — he has the talent and vision to pull it off — but, as Gatiskill notes, we mind it very much with Saunders’ many followers, in the legions of affectless writing, in the sense that I get with so much of the ‘hip,’ contemporary writing I come across that it’s written with a magic marker, that the emotional landscape is deliberately simplified and the physical landscape might as well not exist at all, all the better to get at the dramatic reversals of fortune that characterize cartoon worlds.To be a bit more concrete, Saunders, in Liberation Day, appears to be working in three different modes. There’s the mode of ‘Love Letter,’ which is the most easily pannable — Saunders in beatnik uncle mode, offering tough love in tough times. This story — of the ‘keep your chin up and whistle a happy tune’ variety — is, I guess, excusable in the exigent circumstances of trying to grapple with Trump.
Then there’s the mode of ‘Liberation Day’ and ‘Ghoul,’ which feature an elaborately-designed fantasy scape within which some baby-voiced, if not brain-dead character, attempts to grope towards full consciousness. The allegories here are never all-that-complicated, but it takes some work as you’re reading the story — and the vastly-reduced point-of-view of the main character — to figure out the basics of what’s happening. Fundamentally, I feel that they’re overwrought ways of describing coercion, and the epiphanies of the main characters (“Whammo, found my neck suddenly bent. By what? By low ceiling of rock”; “Why not try being happy?”) are sweet, well-timed, funny, but add up to a kind of animated Truman Show, a preposterous situation, with the characters having to be lobotomized in various outlandish ways for Saunders to get the kinds of effects he’s angling for. Saunders has the excuse that he’s offering, ultimately, a not-bad allegory for the tech-world we’re living in, in which we are reduced to hapless, stock figure ‘avatars’ navigating a likely-malevolent digital reality that we far from fully understand. But, in the end, I don’t quite buy it. The effects feel cheap to me, and lines like “Then we kiss, and, finding a place beside the free-flowing stream, mate” seems less like an accurate rendition of our simple-mindedness within the architecture of our digital reality and more like an an author talking down to, and squeezing laugh lines out of, his characters.
But then there’s also the mode of ‘A Thing At Work’ and ‘Sparrow’ — and most of the stories in Liberation Day are variations on this mode — which is more difficult to pan. These stories, basically, are allegories for the abiding inequality of contemporary America — they take place in a slightly fantastical hinterland (the characters seem always to be living in small towns but maybe also commuting into office parks) and the protagonists find themselves with a bone in their throat connected to the relative status of themselves and whatever arbitrary person their bête noire happens to be. When Saunders is in this mode, the pain of his characters is more grounded — there’s the sense of spending one’s existence feeling picked-upon and with no recourse anywhere in sight. “When was God or whoever going to lower the boom?” asks Debi in ‘Mother’s Day.’ “She had spent a lifetime being everyone’s joke,” she reflects a few pages later. These are valid concerns, and even if the characters themselves are pushed deep into the realm of absurdity — “God, the hours of her life she spent trying to be good,” the ‘Mom of Bold Action’ bitterly reflects, wishing that she’d dedicated herself more to selfishness — there is an underlying concern with cosmic justice. Reading stories like these, I can understand why Saunders is as beloved as he is; like some populist politician, he seems to speak to a very specific sort of grievance, to the ennui of suburbia and the odd permanence of its social hierarchies. This is done most effectively in ‘A Thing At Work’ and most explicitly in ‘The Mom of Bold Action,’ in which no matter how the Mom twists and turns she cannot change the underlying social structure — she cannot will herself into being a better writer, she cannot convince her hapless husband Keith into being more of a shark at work, and she cannot, despite her delusions of benevolence, help but be cruel to the town’s two identical hoboes. “She’d made an already unfortunate person’s life that much crappier,” she guiltily reflects after having goaded Keith into kneecapping one of the two hoboes. And that’s sort of where Saunders leaves his analysis of the American moral landscape — somewhat dim but basically good-hearted people who, through machinations they can’t quite understand, find themselves reifying a very cruel social order.
I have no real critique of these stories — and particularly of ‘A Thing At Work’ and of ‘Sparrow’ — but, again, I just don’t like the direction they take writing in. The movement is away from complex psychology and towards two-dimensional cartoonishness — ‘flat characters vibrating very fast.’ That’s ok for one writer to do, and Saunders can pull it off (there’s room to be funny, sad, virtuosic within his stories), but Saunders is a paradigmatic, era-defining writer, and under his influence American writing drifts inexorably towards tricks and towards parody. In writing, the main thing I look for is a pulse; and with Saunders (and with all of the writers in his wake), the EKG is, truly, a very light line.
SUSAN NEIMAN’s Left Is Not Woke (2023)
A smart take on how the liberal left turned woke.
The real rupture, in Neiman’s construction, was in the middle part of the 20th century, a moment when the “subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim.” This was in its way laudable — a loss of interest in the cult of power, a recognition that the real impact of wars, and dramatic historical events, lands on victims rather than any of the purported belligerents. But, as Neiman notes, the emphasis on victimization has a long tail to it and creates a very different paradigm in the political climate of our time. As she asks herself, “Can we allow the experience of powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political authority?”
There are three directions to move in from Neiman’s core observation. One is an analysis of the shift from liberal universalism to woke identitarianism — which is all about the body and the sufferings of the body. Another is a revisiting of the Enlightenment, and the debates currently being waged about the meaning of the Enlightenment. And the third, which is close to home for me and is a bit outside of Neiman’s construction, is about how paradigmatic understandings of the world mutate over time.
What Neiman cares most about is the Enlightenment. Her belief is that radical thinkers of the Enlightenment ushered in a mode of thought that really is universalist — based in reason and common humanity. From her perspective, it’s accidental that the Enlightenment occurred in Europe — Enlightenment thinkers were working at a moment when universalism for the first time came into view, and the more radical and more advanced of them were able to see past their surroundings to principles that were genuinely egalitarian and genuinely celebratory of the individual. And Neiman is clearly, at a visceral level, appalled by the Left’s turn towards identitarian tribalism and by the Left’s repudiation of the Enlightenment. “There are fewer charges more bewildering than the claim that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric,” she writes. “Those who make them often confuse 18th century realities with 18th century thinkers.” From a historical point of view, it becomes critically important to separate the Enlightenment from colonialism, which Neiman describes as “problematic precisely because Enlightenment values were ignored.”
So, this is the framework that Neiman adopts, that the really important answers were worked out during the Enlightenment and that what was successful in the next two hundred years was the application of Enlightenment principles by the liberal left. And the majority of Left Is Not Woke, and its most anguished sections, chronicle the turn to to the incomprehensible woke belief that “the Enlightenment is responsible for most of our misery.”
In Neiman’s construction, there are three major villains — Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and the evolutionary psychologists — each of whom, she contends, got into the bloodstream of the Left and managed to convince good liberals that there was in fact no such thing as reason; that justice itself was really just a mask for power.
Neiman’s case is the strongest when she’s dealing with Foucault. I admit that I’ve been a bit under the thrall of Foucault — I find his analysis of the dynamics of power relations to be haunting and sort of irrefutable. Neiman’s refutation is that he was really just a jerk — a pure nihilist. It was easy, she argues, for Foucault to critique the application for power because he himself stood for nothing other than a schoolboyish sense of revolt — and he seemed to be constitutionally incapable of making distinctions of scale. If a regime had reformed its power structure to be mildly coercive rather than violent, Foucault, in his analysis of the power structures, simply didn’t factor in any difference at all. For Neiman, what Foucault was up to was basically just mischief — and mischief with a completely outsize influence. “The insistence that power is the only driving force goes hand in hand with the demotion of reason,” she writes.
Foucault’s critique provides a misleading moral clarity. Evil is connected with power — however power manifests itself. Good with the resistance to power. The result — and this combined with the post-war valorization of the vicim — is anarchy and aporia, a refusal to accept the legitimacy of any of the Enlightenment principles, justice, reason, or progress. The Foucauldian anarchy is compounded by the Left’s peculiar fascination with Carl Schmitt and, in the ‘80s, with evolutionary psychology. Power becomes the only truth — and can never be redeemed, can never be laundered through ‘justice’ — and the only question for anybody is where they stand in relationship to the power matrix.
Neiman’s thesis is a wish to return to the status quo ante. Her hero, above all, is Jean Améry, the Auschwitz survivor who opposed a statue to the victims of the Holocaust on the grounds that victimization, just by itself, should not be honored; and who advocated a ‘banality cure’ for Foucault and thinkers like him. Like Neiman, Améry believed simply that critical questions had been solved, that the Nazis were a violent reaction to the Enlightenment and should in some higher sense be ignored, their terror treated as an aberration. And Neiman takes a similar approach to wokeism. The hope is that the poison of it moves out of the bloodstream, that the Left re-educates itself on Enlightenment values and, with them, on the importance of niceness and common sense, as opposed to Foucauldian megalomania.
I’m appreciative of Neiman’s points, although I don’t exactly share Neiman’s framing and am not as enamored of the Enlightenment as she is. I don’t think the Enlightenment can quite be so neatly disentangled from its geographical origins. It was a European project and it was linked to a period when technological progress and imperialist expansion were taken for granted; and its principles do run sooner or later into an inevitable paradox — that individualism and ‘negative liberties’ are all good and well for those who choose to be individualistic but have limited meaning for anyone who, for whatever reason, chooses to find fulfillment through group identity or some form of voluntary coercion. The challenge to the Enlightenment was inevitable and I find it difficult to come up with any solid ground for claiming that Enlightenment principles truly are universal.
On the other hand, I am very taken with the argument that with the valorization of the victim we move into some different phase of history. In my framing, there is a type of consciousness that appears in different societies around the world at different times, and is predominant within a strain of modern Western thought. This consciousness celebrates the ‘capacious self,’ ‘the inner freedom’ of an individual actor who is not linked to their social role. I find this mode of thought to be better, not because it has a claim to universality but simply because I am partisan to it; I find it conducive to the path of individualistic self-fulfillment that I happen to value. But that is a fragile system and it is often under threat from its obverse — a system that finds meaning through humiliation, collective suffering, victimhood. These were the questions that Améry in particular was dealing with so attentively — about whether the Holocaust in some way affected a fundamental conception of consciousness, and, specifically, the consciousness of cosmopolitan European Jews who had been true believers in the ethic of self-fulfillment, the capacious self. His claim — and he should be taken very seriously — was that it had no fundamental impact. That a great part of the fight against Hitler was a fight to preserve cosmopolitanism, to refuse to slide into any identity based around victimhood or the collective.
The turn from liberalism to wokeism is exactly the kind of thing that Améry was so concerned about and that he was working hard to erect a mental fortress against. But this is not specific to our time — it’s a dynamic that occurs whenever people stop trusting in themselves, their intuitions, their self-development, and become seduced by the poetry of suffering, tilt into trauma, the tribe, the collective.
Curious look at Saunders, but you named it: the Wonka-style absurdism meant to comment by exaggeration, rather than true observation.
Here's a deep-cut profile of Saunders as "the prince of the MFA age" from the Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-short-story-priesthood-paoletta
The article's understanding of Saunders as a pivotal teacher has aged well, with his migration to Substack, and it also lends another leg to your criticism of his followers. His stature also comes up for critique, since his persona "makes it all too easy to conflate his way with the way" that short stories ought to be practiced.
Here's a thought on one of Saunders' short stories that appeared in The New Yorker and that, at the time, I used in a class I was teaching: The story: "COMMCOMM"
I argue that this story is a “concept-driven” story; not a character-driven story. In other words, it hinges on an idea. T. Coraghessan Boyle delves into this territory. Have you read “Dogology”? I think that story is a highly successful concept-driven story. Another example of such a story is “The School” by Frederick Bartheleme” (a very good story, indeed, if you can get your hands on it. T.C. Boyle says about Frederick Bartheleme’s story “The School,” “As in any concept-driven story, the author is in danger of painting himself into a corner.”
Now, the q. for you is, Have you read Saunders' novel Lincoln in the Bardo? I do think something real and quality is going on there. I can say more at some point if you're interested.