Helpless human puppets: Liberation Day, by George Saunders, reviewed

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he is still best known as a short story writer.) It’s fair, then, to apply his stated rules to the pieces in his new collection.

The last story, ‘My House’, although briefer, holds up well against Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’. The title immediately contains a twist, because it’s not the narrator’s house, even though the historical building is for sale and he can easily afford the asking price. It might be the house he feels he was born to own as a lover of history and as one who can restore it to its former beauty, but it actually belongs to the impoverished Mel Hays. ‘Is it a story yet?’, Saunders demands of Chekhov. We’re certainly on the way.

He cautions readers not to miss any stray detail. There are hitching posts outside Hays’s barn, ‘each capped with a different serpent’s face’. This, and the subsequent house tour, follow Saunders’s rule of ‘increased specification’ – we start to lust after the house too – but surely those serpents hint at trouble to come. And we’re only on paragraph two! ‘The story form is ruthlessly efficient,’ as Saunders notes.

Why are we reading about this house when the unnamed narrator has presumably lived in many others? Without ever spelling it out, Saunders lets us see that this is a man who in the course of his long life has been used to getting his own way.