The Evolving Comedy of George Saunders
How do you follow a masterpiece? Ideally with another. Such has been achieved by George Saunders. After his Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo—which feels, so far, like the early frontrunner for this century’s Ulysses—Saunders returns to literary fiction with another remarkable collection of short stories, Liberation Day. Those familiar with Saunders’s aesthetic will find the distinct features of his work have further evolved into delightful extremes. There’s the energetic language, the disciplined plot. He continues to introduce his high-concept premises without exposition, keeping the material strange. His characters—though tragic and hapless—are still treated with compassion. But there’s a clear change in the comedic sensibilities, an altered shade of the absurd, which allows Saunders to make this improbable advancement in his work.
As a former student of Saunders’s, I understand I am not America’s first choice to objectively review Liberation Day. But as someone who recently reread all of his prior story collections, I want to examine a passage from each book—CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, Tenth of December, and, now, Liberation Day—to consider how Saunders’s use and sense of humor have evolved over his short-story career.
My wife, hearing me laugh into a state of mild convulsion while rereading “The Four-Hundred Pound CEO” for the dozenth time a few months ago, said to me: “You look so happy.” It was true. I felt happy. Comedy in literature, I think, is more rewarding than in any other form. The laughter comes about from a kind of close attention rarely required of us in our days filled with sedating labor and visual ads. It’s something Saunders is very much aware of: throughout his career, language itself has been the source and the object of his humor. And while his short stories are rightfully known for far more than their laughs, the comic is neither frill nor misdirection in his work. Rather, the language and the comedy are inseparable, much in the same way a map is necessarily connected to its represented geography: comedy occasions his voice, the combination of language systems that bring about that quality of . So while it is notoriously tough to parse funny, and while there is also nothing less funny than trying to explain a joke, I hope to overcome both challenges in what follows
