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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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In
Persuasion Nation by George Saunders |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Consumed The short
stories in the new collection by George Saunders titled, “In
Persuasion Nation,” pack a wallop. Most readers will want to savor these
like vitamin does: never more than one a day. Saunders satirizes the excesses
of our commercialized and media overwhelming society, and reveals our
humanity in ways that are refreshing and hope-filled. Here’s an excerpt, all
of the story titled, “My Flamboyant Grandson,” pp. 13-22: I had
brought my grandson to Being a man who knows
something about grandfatherly disapproval, having had a grandfather who
constantly taunted me for having enlarged calves—to the extent that even today,
when bathing, I find myself thinking unkind thoughts about Grandfather—what I
prayed on both occasions was: Dear Lord, he is what he is, let me love him no
matter what. If he is a gay child, God bless him, if he is a non-gay child
who simply very much enjoys wearing his grandmother’s wig while singing “Edelweiss”
to the dog, so be it, and in either case let me communicate my love and
acceptance in everything I do. Because where is a
child to go for unconditional love, if not to his grandfather? He has had it
tough, in my view, with his mother in Nevada and a father unknown, raised by
his grandmother and me in an otherwise childless neighborhood, playing alone
in a tiny yard that ends in a graveyard wall. The boys in his school are hard
on him, as are the girls, as are his teachers, and recently we found his book
bag in the Susquehanna, and recently also found, taped to the back of his
jacket, a derogatory note, and the writing on it was not all that
childish-looking, and there were rumors that his bus driver had written it. Then one day I had a
revelation. If the lad likes to sing and dance, I thought, why not expose him
to the finest singing and dancing there is? So I called 1-8OO-CULTURE, got
our Promissory Voucher in the mail, and on Teddy’s birthday we took the train
down to As we entered the
magnificent lobby of the Eisner Theater, I was in good spirits, saying to
Teddy, “The size of this stage will make that little stage I built you behind
the garage look pathetic.” When suddenly we were stopped by a stern young
fellow (a Mr. Ernesti, I believe) who said, “We are
sorry, sir, but you cannot be admitted on merely a Promissory Voucher, are
you kidding us, you must take your Voucher and your Proof of Purchases from
at least six of our Major Artistic Sponsors, such as AOL, such as Coke, and
go at once to the Redemption Center on Forty-fourth and Broadway to get your
real actual tickets, and please do not be late, as latecomers cannot be admitted,
due to special effects which occur early, which require total darkness in
order to simulate the African jungle at night.” Well, this
was news to me. But I was not about to disappoint the boy. We left
the Eisner and started up Broadway, the Everly
Readers in the sidewalk reading the Everly Strips
in our shoes, the building-mounted miniscreens at
eye level showing images reflective of the Personal Preferences we’d stated
on our monthly Everly Preference Worksheets, the
numerous Cybec Sudden Emergent Screens
out-thrusting or down-thrusting inches from our faces, and in addition I
could very clearly hear the sound-only messages being beamed to me and me
alone via various Casio Aural Focusers, such as one that shouted out to me
between Forty-second and Forty-third, “Mr. Petrillo,
you chose Burger King eight times last fiscal year but only two times thus
far this fiscal year, please do not forsake us now, there is a store one
block north!” in the voice of Broadway star Elaine Weston, while at
Forty-third a light-pole-mounted Focuser shouted, “Golly, Leonard, remember
your childhood on the farm in Oneonta? Why not reclaim those roots with a
Starbucks Country Roast?” in a celebrity-rural voice I could not identify,
possibly Buck Owens. And then, best of all, in the doorway of PLC
Electronics, a life-size Gene Kelly hologram suddenly appeared, tap~dancing, saying, “Leonard, my data indicates you’re a
bit of an old-timer like myself! Gosh, in our day,
life was simpler, wasn’t it, Leonard? Why not come in and let Frankie Z. explain the latest gizmos!” And he
looked so real I called out to Teddy, “Teddy, look there, Gene Kelly, do you
remember I mentioned him to you as one of the all-time greats?” But Teddy of
course did not see Gene Kelly, Gene Kelly not being one of his Preferences,
but instead saw his hero Babar, swinging a small
monkey on his trunk while saying that his data indicated that Teddy did not
yet own a Nintendo. So that was fun, that
was very New York, but what was not so fun was, by the time we got through
the line at the Redemption Center, it was ten minutes until showtime, and my feet had swollen up the way they do
shortly before they begin spontaneously bleeding, which they have done ever
since a winter spent in the freezing muck of Cho-Bai,
Korea. It is something I have learned to live with. If I can sit, that is
helpful. If I can lean against something, also good. Best of all, if I can
take my shoes off. Which I did, leaning against a wall. All around and above
us were those towering walls of light, curving across building fronts,
embedded in the sidewalks, custom-fitted to light poles: a cartoon lion
eating a man in a suit; a rain of gold coins falling into the canoe of a
naked rain-forest family; a woman in lingerie running a bottle of Pepsi between
her breasts; the Merrill Lynch talking fist asking, “Are you kicking ass or
kissing it?”; a perfect human rear, dancing; a fake flock of geese turning
into a field of Bebe logos; a dying grandmother’s
room filled with roses by a FedEx man who then holds up a card saying “No
Charge.” And
standing beneath all that bounty was our little Teddy, tiny and sad, whose
grandfather could not even manage to get him into one crummy show. So I said
to myself, Get off the wall, old man, blood or no blood, just keep the legs
moving and soon enough you’ll be there. And off we went, me hobbling, Teddy
holding my arm, making decent time, and I think we would have made the curtain.
Except suddenly there appeared a Citizen Helper, who asked were we from out
of town, and was that why, via removing my shoes, I had caused my Everly Strips to be rendered Inoperative? I should
say here that I am no stranger to innovative approaches to advertising,
having pioneered the use of towable signboards in
Oneonta back in the Nixon years, when I towed a fleet of thirty around town
with a Dodge Dart, wearing a suit that today would be found comic. By which I
mean I have no problem with the concept of the Everly
Strip. That is not why I had my shoes off. I am as patriotic as the next guy.
Rather, as I have said, it was due to my bleeding feet. I told all
this to the Citizen Helper, who asked if I was aware that, by rendering my
Strips Inoperative, I was sacrificing a terrific opportunity to Celebrate My
Preferences? And I said
yes, yes, I regretted this very much. He said he
was sorry about my feet, he himself having a trick elbow, and that he would
be happy to forget this unfortunate incident if I would only put my shoes
back on and complete the rest of my walk extremely slowly, looking
energetically to both left and right, so that the higher density of Messages
thus received would compensate for those I had missed. And I
admit, I was a little short with that Helper, and said, “Young man, these
dark patches on my socks are blood, do you or do you not see them?” Which was
when his face changed and he said, “Please do not snap at me, sir, I hope you
are aware of the fact that I can write you up?” And then I
made a mistake. Because as
I looked at that Citizen Helper—his round face, his pale sideburns, the way
his feet turned in—it seemed to me that I knew him. Or rather, it seemed that
he could not be so very different from me when I was a young man, not so
different from the friends of my youth—from Jeffie DeSoto, say, who once fought a Lithuanian gang that had
stuck an M-80 up the ass of a cat, or from Ken Larmer,
who had such a sweet tenor voice and died stifling a laugh in the hills above
Koi-Jeng. I brought
out a twenty and, leaning over, said, “Look, please, the kid just really
wants to see this show.” Which
is when he pulled out his pad and began to write! Now, even
being from Oneonta, I knew that being written up does not take one or two
minutes. We would be standing there at least half an hour, after which we
would have to go to an Active Complaints Center, where they would check our Strips
for Operability and make us watch that corrective video called Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate!, which
I had already been made to watch three times last winter, when I was out of
work and we could not afford cable. And we
would totally miss Babar Sings! “Please,”
I said, “please, we have seen plenty of personalized messages, via both the
building-mounted miniscreens at eye level and those
suddenly out-thrusting Cyhec Emergent Screens, we
have learned plenty for one day, honest to God we have—” And he
said, “Sir, since when do you make the call as far as when you have received
enough useful information from our Artistic Partners?” And just
kept writing me up. Well,
there I was, in my socks, there was Teddy, with a scared look in his eyes I
hadn’t seen since his toddler days, when he had such a fear of chickens that
we could never buy Rosemont eggs due to the cartoon chicken on the carton,
or, if we did, had to first cut the chicken off, with scissors we kept in the
car for that purpose. So I made a quick decision, and seized that Citizen
Helper’s ticket pad and flung it into the street, shouting at Teddy, “Run!
Run!” And run he
did. And run I did. And while that Citizen Helper floundered in the street,
torn between chasing us and retrieving his pad, we raced down Broadway, and,
glancing back over my shoulder, I saw a hulking young man stick out his foot,
and down that Helper went, and soon I was handing our tickets to the same
stern Mr. Ernesti, who was now less stern, and in
we went, and took our seats, as stars appeared overhead and the Eisner was
transformed into a nighttime jungle. And
suddenly there was Babar, looking with longing
toward Paris, where the Old Lady was saying that she had dreamed of someone
named Babar, and did any of us know who this Babar was, and where he might be found? And Teddy knew
the answer, from the Original Cast CD, which was Babar is within us, in all of our hearts, and
he shouted it out with all of the other children, as the Old Lady began
singing “The King Inside of You.” And let me
tell you, from that moment, everything changed for Teddy. I am happy to
report he has joined the play at school. He wears a scarf everywhere he goes,
throwing it over his shoulder with what can only be described as bravado, and
says, whenever asked, that he has decided to become an actor. This from a boy
too timid to trick-or-treat! This from the boy we once found walking home
from school in tears, padlocked to his own bike! There are no more late-night
crying episodes, he no longer writes on his arms with permanent marker, he
leaps out of bed in the morning, anxious to get to school, and dons his
scarf, and is already sitting at the table eating breakfast when we come
down. The other
day as he got off the bus I heard him say to his bus driver, cool as a
cucumber, “See you at the Oscars,” When an Everly Reader is Reading, then suddenly stops, it is not
hard to trace, and within a week I received a certified letter setting my
fine at one thousand dollars, and stating that, in lieu of the fine, I could
elect to return to the Originating Location of my Infraction (they included
a map) and, under the supervision of that Citizen Helper, retrace my steps,
shoes on, thus reclaiming a significant opportunity to Celebrate My
Preferences. This, to me,
is not What But do the
math: a day’s pay, plus train ticket, plus meals, plus taxis to avoid the
bleeding feet, still that is less than one thousand. So down I
went. That
Citizen Helper, whose name was Rob, said he was glad about my change of
heart. Every time a voice shot into my ear, telling me things about myself I
already knew, every time a celebrity hologram walked up like an old friend,
Rob checked a box on my Infraction Correction Form and said, “Isn’t that
amazing, Mr. Petrillo, that we can do that, that we
can know you so well, that we can help you identify the things you want and
need?” And I
would say, “Yes, Rob, that is amazing,” sick in the gut but trying to keep my
mind on the five hundred bucks I was saving, and all the dance classes that
would buy. As for
Teddy, as I write this it is nearly midnight and he is tapping in the room
above. He looks like a bird, our boy, he watches the
same musical fifteen times in a row. Walking through the mall, he suddenly
emits a random line of dialogue and lunges off to the side, doing a dance
step that resembles a stumble, spilling his drink, plowing into a group of
incredulous snickering Oneontans. He looks like no
one else, acts like no one else, his clothes are increasingly like plumage,
late at night he choreographs using plastic Army men, he fits no mold and has
no friends, but I believe in my heart that someday something beautiful may
come from him. The power of
the short story form of fiction rests in its ability to condense so much.
Saunders masters this form, and the stories of In
Persuasion Nation are each as good as the excerpt. If you liked this one,
buy the book and read the rest. Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2006 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/In
Persuasion Nation.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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