The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
George Saunders Bloomsbury, 368pp, £10.99
ISBN 1594481520
During a recent car journey through Massachusetts, I took my family for a reluctant lunch at a franchise of a restaurant chain called Friendly's. While awaiting our meal, one of my kids pointed out the bizarre artwork on the walls, a series of photos of traditional New England landmarks with examples of the restaurant's food Photoshopped in. A car-sized cheeseburger emerged from a covered bridge, a huge scoop of ice cream perched on top of a church steeple and a boat- like banana split entered a snug Maine harbour. Someone at Friendly's seemed to think these bizarre juxtapositions would please diners as they munched on burgers and fries.
We had entered Persuasion Nation, a place where the line between the actual and the virtual, the rational and the absurd, is erased to facilitate corporate interests. In his first two books, George Saunders delineated this nightmare conjunction of fascistic marketing and mindless consumption in a series of razor-sharp, wildly inventive stories. His America is half theme park, half television advert. His third collection - published in the US under the title In Persuasion Nation but here renamed The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, after the novella that Bloomsbury has added to the book - continues in this rich satirical vein.
You do not read Saunders's stories so much as watch them detonate on the page in front of you, like a firecracker some joker has slipped into your pudding. A fairly representative sample of his work is found in the opening lines of the story "in persuasion nation" (most of the titles are in lower case):
A man and a woman sit in a field of daisies.
"Forever?" he says.
"Forever," she says, and they kiss.
A giant Twinkie runs past, trailed by perhaps two hundred young women.
The woman leaps to her feet and runs to catch up with the Twinkie.
"The sweetest thing in the world," the voiceover says, "just got sweeter."
The man sits sadly in the field of daisies.
Saunders not only posits the possibility of a living snack, but also assumes the reader will accept the presence of an unheralded voiceover. In Saunders's world, we are all on television, or might as well be. In "brad carrigan, american", the eponymous hero finds himself written out of his own life after his wife objects to his sympathy for the talking corpses that arrive in their backyard during a commercial break. In "my flamboyant grandson", citizens are punished for not paying attention to the personalised adverts that line the roads and sidewalks of every big city. For not taking "a terrific opportunity to Celebrate My Preferences", the narrator is forced to watch a corrective video called "Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate!". And in "jon", a teenaged boy must decided whether or not to leave the product-testing centre where he has been raised in order to be with the girl he loves. The price of escape is a surgical procedure that will scrub all traces of advertising from his mind, leaving him a blithering idiot. It is a wonderful inversion, presenting us with a world so denuded of meaning that advertising is the only force capable of feeding the imagination.
It is a tribute to Saunders's skill that his stories pack considerable punch even as they remain within the boundaries of realism. In the powerful "bohemians", a young boy's horror at being forced to stay with a crotchety old neighbour turns to admiration when he discovers that she is a far braver, kinder creature than he ever imagined. In "christmas", a young man takes a job as a roofer and watches in impotent dismay as a black colleague is divested of his Christmas bonus by racist workmates in a rigged gambling session.
The book's only flaw is its title novella, a rare misfire by the usually dead-eyed Saunders. Written in a style that perches uneasily between Swift and Dr Seuss, "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" attempts political allegory by depicting the subjugation of the people of Inner Horner, a country not much bigger than a broom cupboard, by its much larger neighbour Outer Horner. Overseeing the oppression is Phil, a bully whose brain has a tendency to fall out of his head when he gets excited. His violent aggression is made possible by an ignorant populace and a compliant press. Although anyone who has watched a Bush news conference will sympathise with Saunders's satirical impulses, the writing is heavy-handed. The novella's inclusion in the volume is as awkward as, well, a giant cheeseburger emerging from a covered bridge.
Stephen Amidon's most recent novel is "Human Capital", published in paperback by Penguin
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