![]() ![]() ![]() In doing so, he elects not to press the button that would send a fellow inmate into a psychotropic hell almost beyond imagining. In "Escape From Spiderhead," the narrator, incarcerated in an institution where new pharmaceuticals are tested on the inmates, does the right thing by committing suicide. ![]() Saunders' heroes are often men cast in sinister, if comic, circumstances who surprise themselves, and us, by behaving better than thought possible. There are many morals to this story, starting with the insidious dangers of consumerism, but the wonder is how it moves from absurdity to empathy-inducing pathos. Take the "The Semplica-Girl Diaries," in which a sad-sack suburban father, living paycheck to paycheck, surprises his daughter on her 13th birthday by decorating the yard with human lawn ornaments just like those seen on the estates of his affluent neighbors. Saunders evokes deep empathy for the plight of his characters, for as strange as they are, each is struggling mightily with life as we know it. ![]() Set seemingly in the near future, the tales are grim and on the surface can be read as a collective polemic on life as a cruel joke. The answer to that is found in the first collection of Saunders' short stories in six years, "Tenth of December." Fans of satirist George Saunders can be so fervent they sometimes induce in others a meh "what's-so-great-about-this-guy?" reaction. ![]()
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