Suzi Feay

Helpless human puppets: Liberation Day, by George Saunders, reviewed

Themes of brainwashing, thought control and mindless violence in this latest short story collection feel like a troubled response to the Trump era

George Saunders. [Getty Images] 
issue 29 October 2022

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he is still best known as a short story writer.) It’s fair, then, to apply his stated rules to the pieces in his new collection.

The last story, ‘My House’, although briefer, holds up well against Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’. The title immediately contains a twist, because it’s not the narrator’s house, even though the historical building is for sale and he can easily afford the asking price. It might be the house he feels he was born to own as a lover of history and as one who can restore it to its former beauty, but it actually belongs to the impoverished Mel Hays.

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