One of the strangest bodies of work of any American writer: George Saunders

George Saunders has over the past 20 years or so built up one of the strangest bodies of work among American short-story writers. I remember when his first (I think) book came out, Civilwarland in bad Disgrace (I may have the last word of the title wrong) and thinking how peculiar it was and how hard it would be to follow up - but Saunders had in fact followed up with about 5 books of stories, each of them odd, each of them similar in theme and scope (from what I've read - most but not all of his stories). He is the descendant of Barthelme via Beckett via Kafka, to give you an idea of his provenance. He has made an entire literary career by writing about losers and outsiders (typical inhabitants of American short fiction) who are denizens of amusement parks, theme parks, or, more recently, subjects of some kind of psychological experiments - typically, his characters are under the control of some unseen and barely known outside force. His best-known story (don't remember the title) is a novella-length piece about people living as a caveman/stone-age exhibit in a theme park - they receive instructions and reports daily by fax, but are supposed to have no contact with the outside world. Current story in The New Yorker, "Escape from Spiderhead," a little more lurid than other Saunders stories, is about a guy being observed in a pharmacology study, drugs pumped into his veins that alter his sexual/emotional feelings toward several women. What to make of Saunders's work? On some level, it seems comical and whimsical, but there are surprising depths to his work as well, as he lives just on the near edge of what's possible - his work imbued with suspicion and even paranoia about loss of control and submission to authority, of the state, the corporation, or both - not much difference anymore.