George Saunders, American
I rendezvous with author George Saunders in the entry pavilion, surrounded by the shrieking lights of the American Expo of Future Atrocities. He recognizes me immediately by my cigarette holder and curled moustache; we pay our fare, and a short Asian woman ushers us into Middle East!
What I intended to do was gently pick George's brain concerning his recent short story collection, In Persuasion Nation, which is alternately the funniest and most heartbreaking book ever written involving castrated dogs, talking candy bars and the eternal recurrence of parental death. Unfortunately, it's exceedingly difficult to hear each other over the keening mullahs in front of the Styrofoam mosque. A succession of hijab-wearing supplicants doesn't make it any easier.
"I'm 47 now, and I know I have little thought loops that are identical to ones I had when I was 10," Saunders says, hollering into my ear. "It looks like free will, like your life is proceeding, but in fact so much of it is predetermined by those habitual thought patterns. So in some oblique way that's working into the stories-how does a person break out of that trap? Chekhov said that stories don't solve problems, they only formulate them correctly. The idea of the writer is to go along the bottom of the pool and stir all this shit up-even if you're not sure why you're doing it, there's a pretty useful function in getting the water mixed up."
At 12 p.m. on the dot a soundless plane drifts overhead and dumps a Limited Carnage Nuclear Payload on the mosque. George and I are showered with white pellets. I'm whacked upside the head with a flying prosthetic limb.
"Let's move," I say. We bypass the three-hour guarded checkpoint by flashing my laminated credentials, feeling only slightly guilty.
Chinese Water Torture! is a bit better than Middle East!-if only because it's really fucking hot out and the random aqua guns are refreshing. We stop to get two corndogs next to the pile of Falun Gong practitioners being beaten (very realistically!) half to death in the central square. The corndogs are delicious. We skip Sweatshop! because, you know, whatever. Some of the Expo attendants have gotten those sponsored tattoos of the Nike swoosh etched onto the lined flesh of their foreheads. They don't look happy.
"It's a kind of a 1960s attitude to have that 'The Man is trying to fuck you,'" Saunders says. "The truth is, we're the Man. The people who are doing ads are just like us, they just made a slightly different decision. We might end up doing it some day. I'm doing it now essentially-I'm trying to sell my book. The thing I found intriguing is that it can't be the case that 'we' are above all that stuff, because if we were, it wouldn't be sustainable. There's a kind of a beauty and horror."
We wind our way through some metal gates, skirting the chlorinated expanse of Bosnian Death Run! It is hard to describe how, like, indelibly awesome it is to be talking with an author whose work you admire! Though at the same time I wish we'd picked a better venue than where we find ourselves now: The Black Zone, which is basically the part of A.E.F.A. where all the really awful shit happens that no one is supposed to know or write about. I'm talking naked heaps of like prisoner-actors being prodded by other, plausibly psychotic actors holding cattle prods and threatening to turn the prisoner/actors into Extra Cheddar Hamburger Helper.
"I'm actually really happy and pretty normal," Saunders says. He's right-he looks really happy and pretty normal. "I know that the work skews dark. If you think of it, anything in those stories that's dark, everyone has had those thoughts before. It's not like it's off the charts. All that means is that somehow maybe I have 12 percent more comfort putting those in a story than someone else would."
We're spat out in the back lot where another short woman with a clipboard wants to gauge our Emotional Responses to what we've just seen, and frankly I'm keen on her shutting the hell up because I am talking to THE George Saunders here, but I know she doesn't even know who THE George Saunders is, and so we hastily circle straight FIVES for "Highly Engaging/Traumatic."
George and I agree that the next time we meet it'll be somewhere a bit more pleasant and less psychologically taxing, like Chuck-E-Cheese or White Castle. "You get up on a day like this," he says, "it's sunny and it's nice. But ever since I was a kid I would've thought-I'm walking around in this body. If this heart stops, I'm done. I had that neurotic tendency to recognize that goodness is temporary. I think in a way that's a form of love, really: You have people that you care about and you love life, and this neurotic thing says not only could this be taken away from you, it will be taken away from you. Storytelling is a form of working through your fears in a certain way and saying-OK, if the shit did hit the fan, what's the ultimate saving grace? You know doom is impending. It doesn't mean that ice cream isn't good, but you want to think about it, to make sure that your current happiness isn't irrational. Enjoy yourself, but temper that with the knowledge that this is a gift."