KEY POINTS:
George Saunders' perceptive humour shines in these 16 essays from the American short-story writer/commentator/satirist. Some are just two or three pages; some are substantial - 10,000 words or so in a couple of cases. Some are expanded from versions in the New Yorker, the Guardian, and other prestigious
publications.
They visit far-off and close-by places. Saunders goes to Dubai: "quite possibly the safest great city in the world ... seamless and extravagant and confusing ... capitalism on steroids".
He travels to the US-Mexican border, to see if it's the threat to national security that some claim, and watches the Minutemen chanting, "What do we want? Deport them now!" He is sent to Nepal by GQ magazine to check out a 15-year-old boy who has supposedly been meditating for seven months without food or water, finds him beautiful and disconcerting, and then writes an utterly hilarious narrative of attempted surveillance.
At home, he muses on personal and national responsibility: "You would not blame a banana for being the banana that it is." He prefers Huckleberry Finn to Tom Sawyer: "Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege.
Huck likes people, fair play, spreading around." Yes, he is eminently and almost end-lessly quotable. He is a dab two hands at appealing aphorisms: "It began life, like so many things in those days, with a nun."
The "it" being the start of his awareness that "working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves". Saunders can be severe on society.
"Something latent in our news media became overt and catastrophic around the time of the O. J. Simpson trial", and the resulting degraded discourse meant that after 9/11, the same "crude, hyperbolic tools" were used to decide a national strategy.
He doesn't just wring his hands; he offers sober, practical advice. "What I propose as an antidote is awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same." He is sometimes cutesy; one piece is a letter from his dog, Biscuit (geddit?).
He can be laboured, as in his examination of human types from "People Who Daydream Obsessively Of Rescuing Someone Famous" to "Clandestine Examiners of One's Own Hardened Nasal Secretions". But there is almost always intelligence, energy and empathy.
Think Bill Bryson with a mordant streak or Dave Barry grown up. Relevant to New Zealand? Oh, yes.
Try his anatomising of the way major news organisations have moved from public interest towards corporate profit-making.
And numerous others.
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
