If you haven't already visited the website for this book, go there now.
The London boozer fully explained. Now smoke free. The funniest fucking book you will read all year. So funny in fact, that Steven Hunt is not allowed to carry a copy on public transport. Buy here
Discovering George Saunders is a bit like discovering a brilliant band that you want to keep to yourself; those rare, once in a blue moon sorts that you pray will fall somewhere short of the dull and normalising yardstick of commercial success. Not, you understand, that I wish any unnecessary privation on my emblematic minstrels, not at all, but I might limit them to Cup a Soup and multivitamins if it meant avoiding (two or three years down the line, when you discover their whoring little arses parked on a sofa beside Vernon Kay) those soul crushing conversations in which you find yourself, in increasingly shrill tones, trying to convince some bandwagon greenhorn that you liked them first, when they were good.
And so it goes with George Saunders, who, I should point out, is a writer, not a minstrel. George Saunders is my literary hero. No one writes like he does, and to be frank (or should that be Cliff?) about it, I wanna lock him up in a trunk so no big hunk can steal him – OK, the hunk bit doesn’t work, but I’m serious about the trunk, as long as it is aerated and offers enough elbow room for him to write in. And regarding him being mine, all mine (insert dastardly laugh here): so far so good.
George Saunders is an American writer, and to my knowledge only three of his five books have enjoyed publication in this country: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Pastoralia, and The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, the latter being a beautifully illustrated modern morality story for children, which left this parent gasping at the sheer brilliance of the storytelling. But even these received little press attention, although the Guardian has at least acknowledged his existence. In March 2005 he wrote the Paperback Writer column in the Saturday Review, the tag line for which read: “Truth, says George Saunders, resides at the level of the sentence.” There then follows a fascinating and trenchant article in which he takes issue with what could be broadly labelled disingenuous writing. As a child he disliked writers and writing, and talking of an English textbook with one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives) he said: “the sentences were lazy and everyday, emanating from what I have since heard called “consensus reality”.” To further illustrate his point he reproduces a sentence from an unnamed novel by an unnamed author that, to be honest, didn’t strike me as particularly dire or out of the ordinary (although I am, it’s probably worth noting, also dangerously disinhibited to CCTV footage of people being stamped on outside nightclubs); a tad wordy and whimsical maybe, but proficient enough. But it has our young author foaming at the mouth: “These sentences repulsed me, the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father’s friends repulsed me. I would never, I swore, wear slippers like that. Only people who had given up on life could wear slippers like that.” He goes further, and towards the end of the article, after reproducing an SS officer’s report to his senior in 1942, conflates such sentences (these “lazy results of agreeing to see the world like everyone else”) with petty bureaucracy and ultimately world domination, which he claims always begins with “weak, evasive, impersonal language”. It is difficult not to fall in love with a writer who feels so passionate about prose, someone who sees the sentence as “where the battle is fought.”
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