A veteran returns home from war, likely suffering from post-traumatic stress. Perhaps the funniest and potentially the grimmest is “Home,” which is sort of a Raymond Carver working-class gothic send-up. One story is cast as a manager’s memo another takes the form of a very strange diary. “Escape from Spiderhead” has all the trappings of science fiction, yet culminates in a profound meditation on free will and personal responsibility. And these are very much stories of these times, filled with economic struggles and class envy, with war and its effects, with drugs that serve as a substitute for deeper emotions (like love) and perhaps a cure (at least temporary) for what one of the stories calls “a sort of vast existential nausea.” On the surface, many of these stories are genre exercises. Even when he is subverting convention, letting the reader know throughout that there is an authorial presence pulling the strings, that these characters and their lives don’t exist beyond words, he seduces the reader with his warmth, humor and storytelling command. Literature that takes the sort of chances that Saunders does is rarely as much fun as his is. A new story collection from the most playful postmodernist since Donald Barthelme, with narratives that can be enjoyed on a number of different levels.
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