Every saint is guilty until proved innocent, George Orwell said. This is bad news for George Saunders, who’s probably as close to a living candidate for canonization as American literature has. Saunders is not just a major author in the eyes of both critics and readers — his sole novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” appeared at No.1 on the New York Times bestseller list, James Patterson territory — but a revered creative writing teacher at Syracuse University, the deliverer of a brilliant and slightly annoying viral commencement speech about kindness and a practicing Buddhist.
How to take up arms against this array of virtues! A scathing review would be the easiest way. Let’s see what we can do.
The book that vaulted Saunders to widespread fame was his marvelous 2013 story collection “Tenth of December.” In it, he seemed to shove fiction abruptly in the direction of the 21st century, describing humans as they muddled through overwhelming modernities. The stories were not just smart and wise but funny, that rarest quality in short fiction. He followed it with “Lincoln in the Bardo,” about Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the heaviest fighting of the Civil War, mourning his son in a graveyard full of antic, loudmouth ghosts. It won the Booker Prize. Now he’s published a new collection of stories, “Liberation Day.”
Saunders often begins in media res, disorienting us with strange language that resolves, eventually, into a rueful clarity. (My suspicion is that the technique derives from fantasy novels — whether that’s true or not, these confusions were another way in which “Tenth of December” so successfully mimicked the feeling of being alive after the turn of the millennium.)