American Culture with the Carrigan's

In Persuasion Nation was a bit of a shock to read right after Jhumpa Lahiri’s beautifully written Interpreter of Maladies, but I found its insane style to be quite refreshing and one of my favorite reads of the semester. Saunders’ writing is quite impressive in the way it takes something so familiar to the reader and turns it into a bizarre nightmarish sort of world, that still often contains some surprisingly deep moral truth or social commentary. This satire is both really funny, and in a few cases actually made me stop and think or get a little fired up about the issues it raised.

“Brad Carrigan, American” is my favorite example of Saunders’ style and of conveying some pretty meaningful criticisms even though they're surrounded by absolutely ridiculous events. Already on the first page, for instance: “‘I tried to butter my toast,’ says Chief Wayne. ‘At which time I discovered that this stick of butter was actually your dog, Buddy, wearing a costume--a costume of a stick of butter!’” (Saunders 119). I read this several times before giving up on any significance it might have. Similar random events occur throughout and are especially strange because they are treated as commonplace, even familiar: “Then we hear the familiar music that indicates the backyard has morphed again, and see that the familiar Carrigan backyard is now a vast field of charred human remains” (Saunders 125). Some of the weirdest stuff is found in the TV-show-within-a-TV-show segments such as “FinalTwist,” in which six friends unknowingly eat their mothers-- possibly a critique of the way TV shows and media have become obsessed with making fun of people and calling out embarrassing things, and the way audiences enjoy watching people do really undignified things. And then there's “Kill the Ho,” where--not to worry--”they don't actually kill them,” just design a digital version of their death (Saunders 138). This is also a pretty clear jab at shows like the Bachelor or America’s Next Top Model, and reality TV in general, that always seem to include a story arc for someone who crashes and burns--it's part of the entertainment.

Besides the satire of television and media, the more striking criticism for me was Saunders’ calling out American culture for thinking so highly of ourselves--specifically the concept that we are so lucky and so privileged and that sympathy for the unlucky is enough to make up for their lack of essential things. The juxtaposition of a news update on trending butt implants with the drastic increase in number of children dying from AIDS in Africa is clearly exaggerated, but also has so much recognizable truth to it and is meant to be an extremely cringeworthy moment in the book (Saunders 129). Saunders is not-so-subtly calling out the tendency of upper class people to sit and contemplate their own fortune instead of actually doing something to actively solve what they say they feel so sad about seeing on TV. To drive home his point about the laziness of American culture, Saunders has the one character who offers to cut down their corn and feed it to the starving children on their doorstep or move the screaming bodies out of the rain or take care of the baby that falls on their roof, be laughed at and completely rejected by his friends. As Doris so elegantly puts it: “I think we’ve been very fortunate, but not so fortunate that we can afford to start giving away everything we’ve worked so hard for. Why can’t our stuff, such as corn, be our stuff? Why do you have to make everything so complicated? We aren’t exactly made out of money, Brad!” (Saunders 132). And as a final gesture, Brad, the only character who is compassionate and thinks about things other than himself, is written out of the show, slowly forgetting himself and turning into a blob. The show goes on with its “mean talk and jokes about poop and butts,” its violence, and its moral lessons that are only spoken and never acted upon--a pretty strong critique of American media culture (Saunders 122). Saunders uses this motif of a character becoming conscious of the meaninglessness of the world around them in several of his stories, such as Jon and the polar bear in "In Persuasion Nation," and while sometimes the slowness at which the characters realize this is mildly annoying as a reader, I generally found Saunders' satire to be very compelling (and also uncomfortably weird!)

Community?

The setting of Lahiri’s short stories alternate between America and India, and it’s interesting to note the differences in how these places are depicted, and to realize that neither is shown in a completely positive light. The main differences Lahiri presents are the greater sense of community and cultural tradition in India that is absent in America. Everyone in class seemed to agree there is more of a sense of community in the stories that take place in India, whereas the characters in America are often suffering from homesickness or the loneliness of not fitting in. The two obvious examples of Indian community that come to mind are in “The Real Durwan” and “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” yet in both of these stories the portrayal of community is not as positive as we might expect--in fact it’s actually pretty ambiguous. In “The Real Durwan,” for example, the people living in Boori Ma’s apartment building seem very together, but they do not treat Boori Ma very well and--while they pretend to include her--she is pretty intensely excluded from their community. They see her more as a helper, someone who can do odd jobs for them, and not as an actual adult person who could contribute anything meaningful. They make her carry heavy basins up to the roof even though she’s an old woman. They don’t give her the courtesy of sitting on actual furniture: “Knowing not to sit on the furniture, she crouched, instead, in doorways and hallways, and observed gestures and manners in the same way a person tends to watch traffic in a foregin city” (Lahiri 76). She has a potentially very interesting and very sad past, but even when she tries to tell them about it, they don’t believe her. She is the Durwan, the gatekeeper and protector of the community, but they don’t really take her seriously. I guess this is kind of understandable since she is an older woman who might be delusional (it is left unanswered whether there are actually mites in her bed or if it’s only the heat). They don’t really expect much of her, and yet, when she doesn’t do the job that she was never fully expected to do, they get upset and kick her out of the neighborhood. This old woman who lived in their building for quite some time is now left to fend for herself on the street. Not the best picture of community.

In “The Treatment of Bibi Haldir,” the community feel is especially present because of the narrative voice talking as “we.” While it is very noticeable that people are often together and interacting with each other, whether this is a positive dynamic or not is once again unclear. Bibi seems to participate more in the community interactions than Boori Ma was able to, but the women she hangs out with still talk to her in a rather patronizing manner. They don’t expect her to find a husband, what with her looks, her sickness, and her quirkiness. Yet they still jokingly encourage her to dress nicer and have conversations with men on the street. They giver her advice on how to attract men and things to say. “‘Frowning like a rice pot will get you nowhere. Men require that you caress them with your expression’” (Lahiri 165). In a similar way to Boori Ma, they don’t really seem to take her seriously, and the fact that they are basically pretending to be her friend and giving her fake aspirations makes it almost worse. It’s possible to interpret their interactions with her as being pretty mean. At the same time, when Bibi starts facing more serious problems, the community does seem to step up to help her. They try to visit her, they send their children to play on the roof to keep an eye on her. “Someone donated a kerosene lamp; another gave her some old mosquito netting and a pair of socks without heels. At every opportunity we reminded her that we surrounded her, that she could come to us if she ever needed advice or aid at any time” (Lahiri 171). I was a little taken aback the first time I read this by how much the community seemed to actually do for Bibi in her time of need. However, reading it again I don’t think their treatment of her is really very impressive. After all, they donate socks without heels, they don’t try that hard to stay in contact with her even though they know she is struggling, and although they say they’ll support her, it’s hard to imagine any advice they could give her being much less condescending than their previous treatment of her. There’s also the fact that they ran Haldar out of business without hesitation, for how he was treating Bibi. I do think I would rather live with Bibi’s community than Boori Ma’s, but neither community is really shown to be all that supportive. Maybe it works for “normal” people, but people who don’t fit in are often excluded, and the community isn’t really there for them.

That being said, I don’t think the point Lahiri is trying to make is that the sense of community in India is not really that special, or that it is always exclusive and fake. After all, the community in America is basically shown to be nonexistent. The Indian characters in the U.S. are extremely lonely and having difficulty adapting to their environment. Mrs. Sen is a prime example of this. She is overwhelmed by seemingly simple aspects of assimilating into American culture, such as learning to drive and eating chicken instead of fish. “If she passed a person, she waved. If she saw a bird twenty feet in front of her, she beeped the horn with her index finger and waited for it to fly away” (Lahiri 120). Mrs. Sen is more aware of community, or a lackthereof, than most Americans seem to be. And as a result, she feels very distant from everybody else, even her husband, and more restricted. But as we see with Mrs. Croft and the narrator of “The Third Continent,” it is possible to find very strong communities in America and to assimilate smoothly into another culture. So Lahiri gives us a rather complex view of these two countries and leaves it up to us to decide the positive and negative features of both. While India seems to have a stronger community feeling, it’s impossible to universally praise all of its social interactions when Lahiri gives us stories about people such as Boori Ma and Bibi Haldar. Instead, I think the positive element of India that America lacks is perhaps more of a cultural identity--an appreciation for food, for customs, for things having their place. These things create a sense of community that is perhaps more apparent once you’ve left it than when you’re still there, and is what people like Mrs. Sen seem to miss the most about India.