George Saunders: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

It was, we did, they are.

But what bothered me at the time was that I could feel that this happy ending wasn’t necessarily so, not for me, and not for other people.

“Every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet,” wrote Chekhov, “to remind him, by his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, sooner or later, life will show him its claws.”

Yes, that’s it, I thought after that phone call. My book is — you know what my book is? My book is: the unhappy man in me saying to the happy man: “There but for the grace of God go you.”

That’s a nice idea, but rereading the book, I’m not sure it’s true. The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen then they’d need to be, if that was the book’s simple intention. The stories are mean, in places. They’re occasionally nasty. They are abrupt and telegraphic and odd. Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters’ asses.

Ah well.

“The writer can chose what he writes about,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”

I guess that’s what I should have told Mrs. L.

13.

When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes.

Hemingway Mountain, let’s say.

He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway.

At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else’s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life short, omitting things he knows are true, adding in things he knows aren’t.

If he’s lucky enough to realize this, he trudges back down off Hemingway Mountain and starts over again.

Ah, look: Toni Morrison Mountain. That’s more like it.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then one day — maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil — he snaps. No more imitation. That’s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding … like himself. Or at least he doesn’t sound like anyone else, exactly. A new mountain has appeared; he can actually see it, his name on it.

But wow, is it ever small.

It’s not even really a mountain. It’s like … it’s like a little dung heap or something.

Okay, okay, he thinks and goes over and stands on it.

The work he does there is not the work of his masters. It is less. It is more modest; it is messier. It is small and minor.

But at least it’s his.

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.

So be it.

Better than being stalled out forever.

He’ll make a collection of lower halves of Barbie dolls and call that a book.

And the thing is: it is a book. That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.

A book doesn’t have to do everything, I remember saying to myself back then, as a form of consolation; it just has to do something .

So, although this book is short and took seven long years to write, and is truncated and halting, and is, yes, dark and maybe even a little sick in places, I remember the years during which it was being written as some of the richest and most magical of my life, full of hope and love and aspiration and the satisfaction of, finally, making something happen.

It’s like this, and it is no dream: First off, a plastic palomino and its stiff-armed rider float above a toybox. The rider is a dyed Custer, and everything’s red. I mean boots and kerchief and holster and eyebrows even. He is one ruined and reduced cavalryman, he was poured and solidified with horribly bowed legs, simply because his only reason for existence is to straddle the palomino. Denied Comanches. But the horse and rider float and revolve anyway, on the lookout for marauders. They rotate at about a revolution a minute, as per specs. Also: a velour basketball, half the size of a real basketball, hangs mid-aired over a crib. In the closet, the arms of tiny jackets and sweaters wave and salute wildly. The threads of the carpet flatten out like grass under a helicopter, and then circular waves run outward from the middle of the room. When the waves die down, it’s just a regular carpet again. The whole cycle takes three and a half minutes. An empty rocking chair rocks faster than any mortal granny could.

Out the wide window across the room, it’s a crescent moon in bough-crook kind of thing; caramel lights through sectioned panes in houses of white wood, trees blown and slanting like smoke. Windows and doors of the houses wide open with Trust. Children breathe pillow air. Hills roll away behind the row of houses in a fairly pastoral manner. It is a kind of smooth blue Ireland. And the blue is in the room too. It is the blue of night scenes in animation. The cloak of night and all that. It is very much like the nights when little kids point at the moon and say odd things. There is the smell of very clean carpet. There is no sound of bugs and no sound of rocking chair or wind or of anything scraping the windowpane. But you can hear the air conditioning. I rub my window clean and enjoy a soft drink.

Here’s something, basically the abuse of an elderly couple. Watch: when they first step in, I’m not worried. They stand in the doorway. He pushes back his baseball cap. She goes for the camera and says, “Cry Pete, woudja lookit all this …” All is well. His hands are behind his back and he steps in, to figure out how it all works. She inspects the finish on the dresser. That she can touch. I have no problem with that. He gets closer and closer to the window (and the village of the caramel lights) and, by gar, it still looks real. It even looks real when his toes touch the crib. Which sits protectively in front of the window. But then he puts his dusty boots on the crib, and his hands on the window frame, and pulls himself up, leans in close to the pane. I cannot have that. I key the mike: “Please refrain from interaction with the components, sir!” Is that any way to talk? Still, it’s a living.

He jumps down like he’s been pinched on the inner thigh and chunks his elbow on the crib and loses his hat in the plastic birds of the mobile. He has acquired a hot and red face, with awkward strands of white hair plastered across it. They stand in the doorway for a long time. He breathes hard. They don’t want to look like they’ve cut and run.

I opt for the Juarez at the Hollo-Chick Haus. It’s a South of the Border Taste Riot. A Hollo-Chick is a kind of chicken conglomerate, the size of a football and hollowed out. You can have whatever you want in there, croutons or sweet-and-sour pork or a light salad even. The Juarez is the one filled with sour cream and refried beans and some little sliced black things. I opt for extra sauce packets.

Hollo-Chick Haus is national. Everyone knows Hans the Hollo-Chick. In the TV ads he strolls along an alpine trail, steam pouring from his beak. One enormous and multi-colored wing is draped over some kids. They look pleased. The voiceover says, “The chicken with the inside as big as all outdoors — and better tasting!”

I finish my Juarez and return the extra sauce packets to Annie, my girl. She used to work at the Haus by the storage units. But then she got transferred in. She says the food set-up is the same, but in here, atmosphere is imperative. At the counter she tells me she has to stay late. This is an Employee Objective Assessment Evening. I forgot. I hang my head and thumbprint the stainless steel counter.