Saunders has made a fictional world of rundown high-tech theme parks, seedy virtual-reality parlors and such seam enterprises as Humane Raccoon Alternatives, which in fact clubs trapped animals to death. And he’s peopled it with such boot-lickers, losers and unfortunates as the eponymous hero of “The 400 Pound CEO,” which won a National Magazine Award when it appeared in Harper’s. Or Downtrodden Mary, the theme-park charwoman who poisons the see-through cows (they have implanted Plexiglas windows) in an exhibit called Our Nation’s Bounty. Or the restaurateur with Tourette’s syndrome who gives out fliers reading, “My affliction is out of my hands. But please know that whatever harsh words I may direct at you, I truly treasure your patronage.” Over-the-top satire? Film rights to Jim Carrey? Wrong again. His people may be grotesques, but the heartaches they suffer feel as believable as yours.
When we catch up with Saunders (who lives in Rochester, N.Y.), he’s just back from picking up his 7-year-old after Brownies. We want to ask straight out where the hell this stuff comes from; instead, we dance around it and ask what he’s doing for a living until the big bucks from writing short stories come rolling in, ha ha. He names a firm of environmental engineering consultants. “It’s mostly technical writing,” he says. “The kind of job you get with one degree in English and one in engineering. The whole Bah Cratehit thing,” Sure, they know he writes stuff on the side; one colleague, he says, encourages him by telling about the tough times Louis L’Amour had to go through.
While growing up, says Saunders, he never knew a writer-“or a reader, for that matter”-and he’s intimidated by the New York literary scene. On his last trip to New York, before going to meet with his agent and publisher, he was towing a barge loaded with sludge. We mention that all this seems not unrelated to the dogsbody’s take on the splendors of technology in his fiction. Saunders laughs. But of course his real life doesn’t explain his work. As he says, “It’s the life most people live,” and no one else we know of has transformed everyday postindustrial drudgery into such fancies as “offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” in which a failing cyberentrepreneur transfers an old’ lady’s memories to disc and peddles them as educational aids to a hustling school principal. We don’t want to call Saunders a visionary or anything-that’ll put you off him for sure–so let’s just say he’s not your usual ex-knuckle-puller, tell you to check him out and leave it at that.
