What our world could be like in the not far distant future: George Saunders's story

I've been a George Saunders fan since coming across a stray (review) copy of his first book, Civilwarland in bad disgrace (?), and have enjoyed reading just about everything of his since then, including story in current New Yorker, The Semplica-girls diary. We say of many writers that they have a unique style, and many do, maybe all great writers do, but Saunders has not only a style and voice that are distinctly his own but also a unique way of seeing the universe. He writes a futuristic fiction that is both a trenchant examination of the margins of contemporary society - his characters are the outsiders and losers that so often populate American fiction, and many tend to be office drudges or working-class dullards, not the introspective literary outsiders much other American fiction - and an imaginative postulation about what our society could become of taken to weird extremes: a famous story, for example, about human denizens of a zoo-like theme park where human behavior is on exhibit (no other writer has written more or better about theme parks), or this current story, a diary written by a terrible writer who takes on the grandiose task of recording his daily thoughts in a notebook so that posterity can have a record of his time and place - the trick is that, on one level, his thoughts and observations about his family feuds and financial struggles are so mundane as to be ridiculous, he is hardly a de Toqueville or a Pepys or an Anais Nin - but in their sheer banality they become almost by indirection a searing and hilarious account of contemporary domestic life: as if one of the characters in The Office were to chronicle his or her life story. Then, there's the odd angle, the bizarre element, that always edges its way into a Saunders story, in this case the Semplica girls of the title, always abbreviated as the SGs, which, we gradually figure out, are Third World refugees hired by some shadowy company to work under contract as living statuary on the lawns and in the gardens of the wealthy - the diarist in this story hits a small lottery jackpot and leases four SGs, attempting to keep up with wealthy neighbors, and things don't quite work out. Saunders has the social-class chasms in America down, and a few moments with his story give us the creepy sense of what life could be like here, sometime down the road, if the right-wing policies of less taxes on the rich and fewer services for everyone else gets to play out its hand: chaos and madness, all coated with a sheen of banality and moral indifference.