George Saunders, the heir to Flannery O'Connor

George Saunders continues to stake out for himself a unique place among the weird and bizarre of American short fiction - he's the obvious heir to Flannery O'Connor, czarina of the grotesque - but his characters have a 21st-century, sectarian malaise, they're people we know, kinda, or at least people we see without knowing, the ones pushing shopping carts along a broken sidewalk and driving an old Chevy with a tailpipe dragging. Saunders is funny and obsessive and observant, and what's more I think he's improving as a writer as he tries new styles and moves off (some of) his familiar ground. Strangely, he first wrote bizarre stories that edged on the futurism and sci-fi, reminded me just a little of Calvino, about people living in amusement parks of the future, and you'd think that would be a one-trick but he got a lot of material out of that postage stamp of ground. It seems that now he continues to write about the down-and-out, bu with a little more of a contemporary, political edge - he's veering closer to a form of realism. His story, Home, in the current New Yorker, is a good example - about a vet of one of the contemporary wars (which one? Iraq or Afghanistan? Nobody seems to know, which is part of the mystique and critique of this story) who comes home to a broken marriage and a highly dysfunctional family. As with other recent Saunders stories, it starts off comical and becomes more menacing as the narrative proceeds, we're not sure of the depth of the rage that the main character feels nor of what danger he represents to his family and to society. A sly, subtle critique of contemporary culture - and really strangely funny, too, a la O'Connor but with an even sharper edge.