Book Review: George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders – The Braindead Megaphone -- (Riverhead Books)

There's a guy at a party with a megaphone, bellowing, and all the shouting and not-thinking has made him go 'a little braindead'. This is the media. Not our publication, but the television news broadcast that presents a story about 'Malls Tend To Get Busier At Christmas!' with the same gravity and earnestness as is given to the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and all of the Iraqistan war reportage. Have you ever seen a six-minute (or more) piece about Thanksgiving in Iraq, where you see soldiers eating turkey and talking about how they miss home, and then you find out from another news source, that umpteen people were killed, I don't know, about six inches from the camera? That's what happens when you don't even need the megaphone any more, when everything is at the same volume. When everything matters, the important things cease to matter, but the title essay in Saunders's latest work is written, it seems, in the spirit of what he calls 'joyfully reckless confidence'.

He doesn't believe this is imposed on us from above, it happens every time we choose to watch I'm a Celebrity, I Like My Coffee With Lowfat Milk! instead of, I don't know, talking to people around us, noticing the world ourselves. But this is good news. It comes from us, which means it can be stopped by us. Rather than, “Yes, media, please tell us as much truth as you can while still making money,” we can insist that we can not only handle the truth, but that we deserve it in all its vile, planet-destroying, fat-clammy-faced-CEO-with-his-hand-in-the-slot-of-your-kid's-piggybank glory. Glory? Something like that.

His essays are witty, accessible, and meaty, like you're really learning something. Something about the meaning of writing in 'Mr Vonnegut in Sumatra' and his enviable appreciation of a well-revised sentence in 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', the dizzying contradictions of the moral quagmire that is Dubai in 'The New Mecca'. Many of these essays are reworked versions of published work in GQ or The New Yorker, or his new introduction to a recent edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The collation is a reminder of his versatility, and of his unmatchable skill as a satirist, the loveable ghost of the risen Mark Twain, a wit as humane as Vonnegut, as biting as Twain, as prescient as Bradbury, and wholly, unrelentingly likeable. We need George Saunders, but more importantly, he needs us, not needs us in a needy sort of way, but we really are required to stand up and remember that the world is full of humans, and more than half of us fall into a category he calls People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction, and all of them deserve at least a little respect. In this George we can trust.