David Gilbert New Yorker story w/ echos of George Saunders

David Gilbert's fiction in last week's New Yorker, The Sightseers, may be part of a longer work - I suspect it is, based on the open-ended conclusion - but I wonder how long DG can sustain the satiric tone over the course of a longer piece. Not too many writers shows such contempt for their characters; DG's characters are the Manhattan plutocrats - a generation, at least, beyond the bond traders of Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities - these folks far more wealthy - though the source of the wealth not made clear we suspect it's from hedge funds and the like. Wondering how DG knows so much about these people and their lifestyle (so to speak): the family tha buys three adjacent townhouses to make their own Manhattan palazzo, for example. Perhaps just from his abundant imagination. In any event, despite their left-leaning sympathies these 0.02 percenters are pretty awful people, primarily made manifest by their scripted management of their children - and particularly vividly presented in a diner party scene when the adults vie for the adulation and attention of teenage daughter of hosts, named Flip, a great scene. What pushes this story beyond a simple satiric portrait of the superwealthy is that it's set sometime in the indefinite future and one of the pastimes (and so-called foundations or charities) of these people is to "sponsor" families on vacation: a family (the Herons) is on vacation in NYC, all paid for and arranged by the superwealthy family, and in return the host gets to watch the entire vacation as each vacationer is equipped with a viewcam; this is a touch a lot like a George Saunders novel or story 0 in particular it recalls the great Semplica Girls story - but not clear where DG is going w/ this motif; one of the families seems to have disappeared and abandoned their cameras - maybe that's something he is developing further if this is a longer piece. Otherwise, it's too much of a loose thread.

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