Liberation Day by George Saunders
Reviewed by Cath Barton
One opens Liberation Day with a frisson of excitement, a sense of hope and just a tremor of fear: will this new collection of short stories from George Saunders, ten years on from his much-lauded Tenth of December, dazzle as that did? Can anything be as startlingly original as ‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’, in which girls from third-world countries are paid to decorate the lawns of wealthy Americans in a bizarre fashion?
Like ‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’ and several others from Tenth of December, more than half of the stories in Liberation Day were first published in the New Yorker, which continues to make them freely available to read, together with other material which throws light on their genesis, such as the interview with Saunders which accompanies the first publication of the story ‘Ghoul’. Set in the Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park, it’s one of the more enigmatic stories in Liberation Day — reassuring that the author himself says ‘it’s a weird story, for sure, and I don’t really know what it means’.
What he goes on to say in that interview is illuminating for this collection as a whole: ‘What I’m trying to do these days, in the story form, is surprise myself — get out beyond my conscious mind and what I already believe and perform a sort of rowdy, joyful blurt.’ He does that splendidly in ‘The Mom of Bold Action’, the narrator of which endears herself to all those women trying to write stories who are derailed by the minutiae of the day-to-day, not helped by their fears about what might happen to the child — and then that child comes home with blood on his face... This mom feels she has to do so many ‘good’ things to offset her guilt about something bad that she believes has happened in consequence, such as:
‘... how many hours did you have to spend in the store trying to decide which fruit punch had the least high-fructose corn syrup... and how many rude rejection letters did you have to decline to respond to just as rudely...’
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his masterclass on the craft of the Russian short story, Saunders describes the form as ‘a system for the transfer of energy’. It is a sophistication and development of the notion that in the short story every word must count. Saunders deftly matches form with emotion, conveys the nuances of human relationships, expands (again) the scope of the short story.
In ‘Love Story’ we sit alongside the grandfather replying to a letter from his grandson: the quandaries the boy has posed mysterious to us, but the care in the response tangible. In ‘A Thing at Work’ he takes us into the heads of his characters, to roll with the punches they receive as they engage in small but cutting deceptions and rivalries.
In ‘Elliott Spencer’ we are back in the territory of speculative fiction, where poor people are brainwashed and used by others for their political ends. The ‘scraping’ of the victims’ memories is not always complete and the power balance shifts. What is particularly interesting here is the way that Saunders deploys language, literally breaking it down word by word and reforming it into a sparse new narrative, reminiscent of the cadences of the poetry of e e cummings. At the end of the story the person who was the wino Elliott Spencer has ‘memories old and new’ and gained hope:
‘For as long as this world is shiny new there is no death and what lovely may I not yet do?’
The collection is bookended by two new stories. In the title story Saunders continues the exploration of the hollowness of the American dream which he portrayed in ‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’, in an equally fantastical setting. As in ‘Elliott Spencer’ we begin with a number of people who have had past memories erased and who are given material to perform. On this occasion they are to recreate the story of Custer’s Last Stand. The person pulling the strings of these unfortunates refers to the event as the American Iliad. The performers are aware that:
‘Peace is not, apparently, the general human intention, although, in the spare hour (in the dear home, in the individual heart) it may sometimes seem to be.’
And so it transpires. The story is a tour de force, a whirl of energy, encompassing, as well as all aspects of battle, reflections on the nature of human desire and the occasional wry smile.
The collection is rounded off with ‘My House’, a story about a man’s thwarted desire to buy his dream house. It is a beautiful story of direct simplicity that says, in a few pages, everything about the way we oscillate in life between hope and despair and discover that, in the end, nothing lasts.
Liberation Day is published by Bloomsbury, 18th October, 2022