![]() ![]() The Pulse is described by our narrator, a Speaker called Jeremy, as he enters into the performance, melts into his characters and begins really speaking their lines. ![]() Now comes something more interesting: the Pulse. Sitting cross-legged near the Mod, he laboriously hand-inputs much new material intended to address adult son Mike’s critique re the paucity of Indigenous accounts.’ ![]() ‘Which, by the way, seems to be badly neglecting the Indigenous perspective.’ So, ‘in an hour or so, Mr U returns, bearing history books. ‘Have fun choreographing your reactionary History Channel bullshit,’ ASM jeers at his father, as the Speakers rehearse for a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand. In the modern mode, the story incorporates its own criticism, in the form of Mr Untermeyer’s Adult Son Mike. The actors of ‘Liberation Day’ are down-on-their-luck Americans who have agreed to have their pasts erased, their voices overridden and their bodies subjected to the manipulations of one Mr Untermeyer, who seems dreamed up to answer the question, ‘What if Ken Burns were evil?’ The Speakers, as Mr Untermeyer calls them, hang on his Speaking Wall, pinioned in the shape of the letter X, and here they perform dramatic retellings of historical events for Mr U’s suburban dinner guests. He has received, in the language of the title story, a few new Mods. It’s been a while since we had a writer so widely revered who has such a limited range, though it sometimes jumps high above itself. Being something of a desk guy, Saunders works from templates: Rat Named Kyle Trapped in America-Themed Diorama That Is Wired to Electrocute Him, at the End He Gets a Four-Cent Raise Loser Must Save a Ten-Year-Old Boy from Death Frantic Forty-Car-Pile-Up of an Inner Monologue Keeping Up with the Joneses, Dystopia Edition Teens in a Lab. (That long ago, really? Well, he was busy becoming an international institution.) At first, it doesn’t seem to progress much beyond those stories. Liberation Day, down to the title, is a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last collection, 2013’s Tenth of December. We are going to fight the Civil War again. Their imaginations are intact, so is his history gets worse every year, but still he loves it he races back and forth in front of the room, sweat stains occasionally flashing under his arms, gesturing in a way that could never be Italian. This is not the adult world it isn’t even high school. He is known, adored, famous equally for getting too much spit in his mouth and being a poet of second-tier cusses – the word ‘crap’ in particular. Perhaps he, though a principled man, is having an after-hours affair with another teacher, called Deborah. Perhaps he, though a level-headed man, has gone somewhat off his nut from knowing so much about American history. He is figuring it out, living in the excitement of it, piling formal solution on formal solution. He is speaking the story, or writing it, or daydreaming it at a desk in an empty classroom. He is not George Saunders exactly – an old version maybe, or a could-have-been. H alfway through my first reading of ‘Liberation Day’, the 63-page title novella of George Saunders’s new collection, a man appears to me. ![]()
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