Author George Saunders' Nonfiction
The Braindead Megaphone: Essays, Articles, and Travelogues
Review of George Saunders' new collection of essays "The Braindead Megaphone," as it travels from Dubai to Nepal to the U.S./Mexico border to right here at home.
George Saunders' Fiction
George Saunders' Fiction is strange—very, very strange—and also wonderful—very, very wonderful. In his stories, one finds polar bear protagonists and robot tyrants ruling in the oddest kakistocracies imaginable, a 21st-century science fiction playing itself to comical absurdity. Occasionally, Saunders’ stories will have fairly obvious real-world parallels (homosexual marriage, the Bush administration), but they’re still written with such unreal detail that they outright ridicule the depressing truth of those realities. Saunders doesn’t write nonfiction; he uses nonfiction to write fiction, writing as a first-person motivational speaker, writing a story framed as an engineering handbook.
But he does write nonfiction, and his collection of essays The Braindead Megaphone shows he’s just as deft at telling the truth as he is at making it up.
The Braindead Megaphone
The title essay is a clever metaphor for the stupefying effect of sensationalist media: imagine a party where everyone’s socializing happily, mingling amongst themselves, when in trots a man with a megaphone, who starts shouting his opinions at all parties interested or not. From that point on, other conversation necessarily stops, or if it continues, it continues in response to whatever the megaphone speaker is saying. When applied to the news media, that means the dumber and louder the reporter gets, the dumber and louder the audience becomes. This phenomenon, expertly illustrated (and corroborated by The Onion), shows how much major news organizations don’t lie or misinform, but make us believe fear-mongering hysterics is information.
Saunders' Travelogues
Three wild, musing travelogues as outrospective as they are introspective are included: desperate to distance himself from being “a field rep for the Society of International Travel Voyeurs,” he goes to see the gilded fantasy of Dubai, finding the poor there just as contented as the rich, happy to be able to labor amidst such cartoon opulence. On the U.S.-Mexico border, he meets both refugees and Minutemen, both groups lost and aimless, almost adorably ineffectual in their causes. In Nepal, Saunders investigates the “Buddha Boy,” a teenager who’s supposedly been sitting meditating in one place for seven months without eating or moving. Throughout the piece, Saunders tries to abandon his Western skepticism to see the boy for who he is.
Saunders' Humor
Having ever read any Saunders, one knows he’s first and foremost hilarious: Saunders the Humorist writes a clueless “Study of the British” where every “fact” is wrong; he writes as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad giving a lecture on English euphemisms (“elastic loaves” instead of “pizzas,” “that which is too hot to be seen” instead of “women”), as an elderly man outraged by the TV show “HottieLeader, featuring computer simulations of what various female world leaders would look like naked and in the throes of orgasm,” as a terrifically unhelpful advice columnist, and as a dog tired of having to watch his masters having sex. Of course, humor informs almost every piece, making even literature surveys readable.
George Saunders' "Essay Collection"
As much as “essay collection” is a bad word, the most outmoded literary genre (besides maybe “sermons”), Saunders makes a strong case for them. A MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, Guggenheim fellow, and one of Entertainment Weekly’s “Most Creative People,” Saunders writes with a trifecta of content, voice, and wit, not just finding the best stories and topics but writing about them well, with considerate and scholarly attention sprinkled with very, very funny humor.
