Start generating frank and nonbiased assessments of subpar colleague,” while researchers who kill their human test subjects exonerate themselves by announcing they are merely obeying “the mandates of science”. Employers talk of “staff remixing”, not layoffs, and urge their employees to “Tell the truth. These stories are rife with euphemism, those phrases Saunders identifies as ways of enabling the unsayable to be spoken, and the unthinkable to be broached. “Market forces at work.” The words could be a top-line summary of Saunders’s stories, whether their focus is demeaning wage slavery (stripping at a chain restaurant inhabiting a lonely cave on the outskirts of a vast theme park), advertising ( the nightmarish marketing research facility of Jon the consumerist, Philip K Dickian society of My Flamboyant Grandson), the military (the angry, isolated veteran of Home), or drug testing (on chimps in the bleak lab report of 93990, and convicted felons in the more satirical Escape from Spiderhead). Variants of it occur again and again in his work, expressing the idea, as he put it in 2001, “that our public institutions – our companies and our government and our media – absolutely affect our ability to exist gracefully in the world”. “‘I pour my life’s blood into this place,’” the narrator’s father says in the early story Isabelle (1994), “‘and you offer me half what I paid?’ ‘Market forces at work’,” the estate agent replies, a line that is virtually impossible to argue with, both within the confines of the story and without. The powerlessness of the individual haunts his stories, the sense of citizens being to multinationals as flies to wanton boys. Aside from being one of the funniest writers around, it is difficult to think of anyone better than he is at describing how commercial imperatives deform individual lives.

Saunders’s America isn’t only divided into left and right, but also rich and poor, black and white, and, most notably, the individual and the corporation.

Civilwarland in bad decline review