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!)