As the title suggests, I’ve chosen “Commcomm” by George Saunders as our next story. I’ve been meaning to read his short story collection “In Persuasion Nation” (which contains Commcomm) for a while now so I thought I’d use the reading club as motivation to get started.
I’ve only read the first couple pages but it seems, at least, interesting. It was originally published in The New Yorker and you can find it online here. Wikipedia tells me the author has been compared to Vonnegut so I suppose you should expect some sharp writing and a healthy dose of hilarious/cynical social commentary.
Since it seems that everyone else has been as busy as I have, we’ll go ahead and hold this story for another week. I am assuming that people are still interested.
I finally got around to reading this and I have to say that it was a little difficult. I had to slog through the beginning before I felt any sense of rhythm or attachment to the story. I put it down to Saunders’s prose, which is a staccato, non-sequitur, random aside sort of referencing that I did not understand. PIDS? PCGS? discontinued automotive? Historical as a pronoun? What’s going on? What’s CommComm? Suffice to say, reading it was like muddling my way through fog and I kept wondering whether if I were more American, I would understand it. Or something. I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t grok onto Saunders’s writing style.
On the other hand, when the story finally got down to its character parts did I manage to get a sense of the shape of the story. What little I understood, I liked. Mostly I appreciated that the Christian character isn’t stereotypically demonized in the end, though the inclusion of supernatural elements at the end was a bit a jarring. It might have been more jarring if I had better sense of time and place, or less as it were, but the ending made up for the time spent trying to decipher
Saunders fits his ‘voice’ to the particulars of his narrative. In this case he’s writing in, I think, a middle class, American vernacular. For other examples, see Jonor 93990 (fourth story on that page).
though the inclusion of supernatural elements at the end was a bit a jarring
I agree, although I think it was necessary to prevent the story from dissolving into nihilism. Anyone can do cynical, but believable redemption is tough.
