Going the Distance: On George Saunders’ “Liberation Day”
Liberation Day | George Saunders | Random House | 2022 | 233 Pages
“You are trapped in you,” a voice says in “The Mom of Bold Action,” the second of nine stories in George Saunders’ fifth collection, Liberation Day. It’s spoken by said unnamed mom, but she’s doing a bit of ventriloquism here, giving another character his line within an imaginary conversation, which exemplifies the trap rather well. Saunders’ stories are concerned with how people can escape themselves, and how capable they are of understanding each other. He constructs various scenarios in which his characters might envisage someone else’s inner life. In his 2016 Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, he worked with a supernatural conceit whereby souls moved in and out of bodies, which allowed Lincoln’s son to share in his father’s mourning for him, and for a deceased slave, Thomas Havens, to experience being the bereaved statesman. People are not usually so permeable. In Liberation Day, it’s more difficult for them to take such empathetic leaps. Sometimes they don’t even try.
In “Mother’s Day,” a widow and the woman who had an affair with her now-deceased husband see each other across the street. Saunders switches several times between the two close third-person perspectives. The widow, Alma, notes how skinny the other woman has become: “Who did she think she was, Ghandi or whoever? Mrs. Gandhi?” Meanwhile, Debi, the other woman, envious that Alma’s daughter gave her flowers, thinks, “Mean Old Thing (Alma) gets Mother’s Day flowers; Nice, Generous Mom (her, Debi) gets—" before lapsing into insult: “Lord, what a face: shriveled apple.” Saunders brings down a dangerous hailstorm, and yet she still cannot forgive Alma for her haughtiness: “How was Alma doing over there? Not great. Getting pounded. Ha! There you go, kid.” Empathy has failed, owing to a lack of curiosity about what it would be like to be the other person. As Alma puts it, “Why would you want to even know that? It didn’t amount to anything.” The hailstones grow from walnuts to golf balls. Alma feels a tightness in her chest. Her loving daughter is left “sobbing against a tree.”
“A Thing At Work” is another narrative of non-communion. It’s the story of office rivals Brenda and Genevieve, who torment and tattle on each other until Brenda is fired for stealing paper towels and other necessities. The story starts in the break room with an appeal from Brenda for Gen’s concern over her many trials, including raising two kids in the “same old crappo two-bedroom,” being kept late by the boss, whom she calls “a certain dodo,” and having to take the bus because her car is in “that frigging rip-off of a shop again.” Gen has heard much of this before. Saunders sketches the predicament with simple precision: “Gen glanced longingly back at the hallway,” but “Brenda had more to share.” The same incuriosity noticed in “Mother’s Day” stifles communication. Once Brenda is fired, it’s Gen who shares too much about her home life with the boss. “How is it you feel so comfortable telling me all of this?” he thinks.
Though Brenda loses out in “A Thing At Work” while Debi is spared in “Mother’s Day,” the two women sound very similar. This is largely because they are of a type, what Gen calls the “white-trash lady.” Characters with names like Brenda and Debi and Greggie and Bethie and Vicky and Pammy—all names that are a little too American—push Saunders’ American, often small-town settings toward Americana. He spangles stars all through the collection, showing a fondness for History Channel history and archaicism. This retrospective tendency takes us away from the immediacy of the actual American context while adding a mock patriotic flair. Thus in the titular story, a science fiction, the incongruous name “Jed Dillon,” attached to a minor character, prepares us for Saunders’ interpolation of Custer’s Last Stand. In “The Mom of Bold Action,” the mom, wanting to reassure her teenage son Derek by telling him that even a young George Washington masturbated, elaborates with the future president’s vision of his neighbor “bringing her quill pen absentmindedly to her full lips.” And in “My House,” the narrator who wants to buy a lovely old home on a hill is thrilled to find in it “the neck of a fiddle played at Antietam.”
Liberation Day is festooned with American décor, but it’s not really about America. Rather, it’s about empathy as it operates in fiction: between characters, between author and character, and between reader and character. Rereading the titular story, which appears at first to be forming an allegory to an American reality, or speculating about an American future, one realizes that one has encountered something of a red, white, and blue herring. The other interpretation on offer, if America is not Saunders’ primary concern, is an analogy between the new fictional medium which “Liberation Day” describes, and the writing of fiction, both of which feature empathetic flights. The story is about an enslaved class of people who have had their memories wiped and are responsible for entertaining their owners and owners’ friends by “Speaking,” a technical term for a kind of dramatic oratory, which, as explained by the narrator Jeremy, himself a “Pinioned” prisoner, comes through them, not from them: “Once the Pulse is fully upon you, here will come your words, not intended by, but nevertheless flowing through, you, built, as it were, upon the foundation that is you, supercharged by the Pulse.” “Speaking” is exhilarating for Jeremy. When he’s inspired by the Pulse, and his master Mr. Untermeyer has chosen the topic for him to work with, “Nautical,” we get James Joyce on a boat: “Hoary hands grip and release rainslick masts as the rain pounds crosswise the darkwood deck veined by ancient ropes greenish with mold.” Later, in preparation for a group performance of Custer’s Last Stand, the speakers are given a “Knowledge Mod.” Jeremy has the role of Private Fritz Neubauer of the Seventh Cavalry, and “Speaking” is something quite different: “Now we are given facts. Real facts. Which are helpful. In making compelling structure. It is like walking down a tight hallway, constrained on either side by gray walls of fact.” Within the analogy between “Speaking” and writing, Saunders has narrowed the two to the particular mode of historical fiction, that arena where dead and dignified personages can be animated, like Custer with his “anxious American ambition,” with “his love of dogs, his manic, staccato way of speaking when excited.”
Jeremy doesn’t play Neubauer for long. Abrupt changes in perspective occur, as in Lincoln in the Bardo, here made possible by technology rather than the supernatural. To Major Marcus Reno’s battalion, the Native Americans seem from another world, but after Mr. Untermeyer’s manipulation, Jeremy and his troupe “become those ‘fiends,’ those Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne, those sons and husbands and brothers, to whom the white devils on the hill no longer appear frightening.” Saunders uses a version of this trick when he switches across the street in “Mother’s Day” and across the office in “A Thing at Work,” using paragraph breaks in accord with the conventions of literary fiction. These are liberties long enjoyed by novelists, whereas the switches in “Liberation Day” are made possible by the genre conceit of future technology. In either case, Saunders is making a performance of his imaginative jumps, of empathy itself, with an admirable enthusiasm for entertaining us.
In “Sparrow,” he makes an exception where elsewhere he has written in the first-person singular or in a limited third. He moves between first-person plural and singular, and is much further distanced from the story such that it reads like a parable. A young woman without opinions falls in love with a man who likes that she will never disagree with him. Despite his mother’s opposition, they get married. The mother eventually sees that they are good together and is happy for them. The narrative is mediated by cliché, and simple explanations: “But Randy, as they say, thought his mother hung the moon, and this was because she thought he hung it. It was a kind of mutual admiration society. He got along nicely with her. And she got along nicely with him.”
Unlike anything else in Liberation Day, “Sparrow” is somewhat mawkish, ending on the mother’s note that the couple are “devoted, absolutely devoted to each other.” Owing to the simplicity of its story, its lack of concrete detail, and the parallelism above—all in contrast with the rest of the collection—“Sparrow” reads like an experiment in a flat style, with flat characters. Its tone is mildly sentimental. The setting, while vaguely American and small-town, is abstracted. Working without genre or shifting perspective or free indirect bawdiness, Saunders has placed in the center of the collection a quiet and clean story, which gives him a very different license. Here he can turn to his readers and ask them to attempt their own flight of empathy: “So, imagine you are a woman who, all your life, people have shied away from and avoided”; “And imagine you are that man, who, for the first time, feels he is protecting a woman not his mother.”