The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Saunders · six stories and a novella · Random House, New York, 1996 · scored as one book on Saunders’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and none of its sentences quoted
Mode
Satirical fable as first-person confession; dark comedy, ghost story and near-future satire under one deadpan voice
Mythos
The past that will not stay sold, its dead walking a park that sells their war; the holy fool turned avenger; the quest for a lost sister across a broken land; the marked caste: myth evoked in strong figures, built in few
Phase
Lives seized at the moment their arrangement fails: a park in decline, a firm’s killing, a parlour of memories, a water park’s guilt, and a long journey through a future America
Presentation
Fiction; six stories and a novella, “Bounty”, by far the longest piece; most told in the first person by a man near the bottom of the enterprise that employs him
Register
A procedural, upbeat and evasive first person in the idiom of management, the flat statement landing a beat after the outrage; grotesque at its edges, and an open tenderness at the ends
Scale
One class in one economy, seen from the bottom: a job, a family, a debt, a crime, carried in a few pages each
Governing Proposition
Six stories and a novella, most of them told by men employed at the bottom of a failing enterprise, a Civil War theme park, a water park, a firm that kills the raccoons it claims to relocate, a parlour of implanted memories, in a near future set a step from the present. The wager of the book is that such a man is made the instrument of the cruelty that keeps him employed and consents to it in his employer’s own words, and that a first person built of those words can show both the consent and the one thing in him the enterprise does not own, a decency he cannot afford.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A Civil War theme park is losing its visitors. Its narrator works there, near the bottom, and tells the story in the first person, in the cheerful, procedural idiom of the management he serves. Gangs of vandals trouble the grounds, and the owner hires a veteran with a violent past to deal with them. The veteran begins to kill. The narrator knows, and keeps quiet, because keeping quiet keeps his job. The story gives the book its name, and its premise holds the whole: a man at the bottom of a failing enterprise, made the instrument of the cruelty that keeps him employed.
The park sells a war. It stages the past for gate receipts, and the past does not stay staged. The narrator is visited by the ghosts of a family who lived on the land in the 1860s, and they walk the grounds that now reenact their war for a fee. Saunders gives them the same flat treatment as the falling attendance and the owner’s plans, so that the dead and the business share one plane: the supernatural arrives with no more fuss than a memo. The haunting is not an escape from the economy of the park. It is part of the inventory.
The narrator is killed in the end by the man whose killings he kept quiet about. The story is the book’s pattern in full: a degraded workplace, an abject narrator, a death, and something that outlasts the death. George Saunders’s first book was published by Random House in 1996, six stories and a novella. Most of its pieces are told by men employed at the bottom of a failing enterprise, a theme park, a water park, a firm of pest removal, a parlour of memories, and several are set in a near future displaced a step from the present, close enough to be recognised and far enough to show its logic plainly.
Movement II
The firm in “The 400-Pound CEO” claims to relocate raccoons. In fact it kills them, and the word relocation covers the killing. Its narrator is its fattest employee, obese and mocked, and he is the one who does the clubbing. He is abused by his boss and laughed at by the others, and he imagines himself, in the title’s phrase, the chief executive he will never be. Each humiliation in the story readies a blow, and the blow comes: he kills the boss, by accident. He is found out and jailed.
Here the book’s finding is most exact. The worker at the bottom is made the instrument of the firm’s cruelty, and he consents to it in the firm’s words. The language of management, cheerful, euphemistic and procedural, is not a disguise laid over the work from outside; it is the medium in which the narrator thinks. Saunders’s first person is built for that. The narrators think in the idiom of their employers, so that the system the stories expose is found inside the mind that tells them, and the reader hears the consent before seeing the cruelty it permits.
The method depends on timing. A flat statement lands a beat after the outrage, and the gap between the two is where the comedy is and where the horror is. The compression is as exact: a life, a debt, a crime, carried in a few pages by what a narrator lets slip rather than by what he says. Told in the third person, the same events would show exploitation from outside, and the reader could stand apart from it. Told from inside, they show a man who cannot stand apart, because the words he would need in order to refuse belong to the people who employ him.
Movement III
In “The Wavemaker Falters” the operator of a water park’s wave machine lives with the death of a boy he caused. The story restates the title story’s guilt and haunting in a smaller key: another leisure business, another man near the bottom of it, another death he cannot put down. Read beside the title story it shows the book’s template plainly. A degraded workplace, an abject first-person narrator, a death he causes or suffers, a ghost or an afterlife: the pieces share a shape, and the shape recurs.
That recurrence is the book’s limit as a whole. Inside each story there is little to cut, but across the book one piece can echo another closely enough that either could stand alone, and the stories could stand in another order. The narrators’ voices, so exactly built, are nearly one voice, and the men who speak them blur into one man. Some jokes are broad, and the near-future furniture is at times laid on as a gag. A collection gathers rather than compels, and this one gathers several versions of one discovery.
The discovery was new to the American story of its decade. Its inheritance is plain: Vonnegut’s dark comic fable, Barthelme’s absurdist story, Gogol’s abject clerks, and against them the workshop realism of Carver and the writers around him, by which new stories were then measured. The book grafts the language of corporate management and an invented near future onto the confession of a working man, and joins satire’s cruelty to an open tenderness. A first book built on ghosts and theme parks, in a market that rewarded realism, risked sentiment on one side and the gag on the other. Vonnegut and Barthelme had cleared much of the ground; the voice was Saunders’s own.
Movement IV
A widower runs a parlour of implanted memories. A lonely old woman comes to him, and he empties his own memories into her: his memories of his wife, given away for a stranger’s comfort. It is the book’s other finding, set beside the first. Kindness survives in the abject, and it is costly. The narrators of these stories cannot afford their decency, and some of them spend it anyway, and the spending is the one act in them that their employers do not own.
The book rises rarely, and it rises at the ends. The close of the title story is its height. The narrator, killed by the man he kept quiet about, becomes a spirit and drifts among the living, wishing to enter their hearts and turn them. The deadpan has held back its pathos until that moment, and spends it at once. The close of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” reaches a quieter height, in a man emptied for an old woman’s sake. Terror comes earlier, in the title story’s killings. Between the endings the book stays on the level ground of its comedy, by design.
The ghosts belong to the same economy as the living. The family of the 1860s walks a park that sells its war; the spirit at the close of the title story drifts among the living still; the old woman is sold a dead wife’s memory as a service. Past, memory and the afterlife are all on the books. The figures summon old patterns, the past that will not stay sold, the holy fool turned avenger, purgatory itself, but they summon them inside single stories and do not carry them across the book. They stay particular, men of one class in one economy, which is the book’s strength and its boundary.
Movement V
“Bounty” is the novella, and by far the longest piece. It is set in a future America in which people with bodily deformities, the Flawed, are a servile caste, and its narrator, one of the Flawed, journeys across the country in search of his sister. The quest for a lost sister across a broken land is old, and the caste carries the older shape of the marked and the enslaved. The law that governs the theme park governs here: the past there is sold as spectacle, the future here sells bodies, and the bodies in both are counted as stock.
The novella is also where the book is weakest. Its journey runs through a series of encounters in which one follows another and several could be lost without the argument changing. The picaresque middle is slack beside the stories’ tension, and the voice that is so exact over a few pages is stretched over a length its form does not compel. The state appears in “Bounty”, and in the police elsewhere, but otherwise as absence; the sacred is ghosts without a theology, and the natural order is a theme park’s lawn. The book’s world is one class in one economy, seen from the bottom.
Saunders went on to Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), Tenth of December (2013) and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Booker Prize, and he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. The manner first appeared here, and much of what it later did in the field, in writing programmes and in a fiction of corporate absurdity, runs through those later books. This one has stayed in print, and its title story is taught. Thirty years on, its theme parks, its precarious workers and its euphemisms read less as a satire of the 1990s than as a forecast. It is a first book that made a voice, and it has lasted.
Act III · The Twelve
Two tests, and they part. Within the stories the subtractive test mostly fails to find a cut. The title story moves from the park’s decline to the hiring of a killer, the killings, the haunting and the narrator’s death without a scene to spare, and in “The 400-Pound CEO” each humiliation readies the blow that kills the boss. Across the book the test bites. The stories share a template, a degraded workplace, an abject narrator, a death he causes or suffers, a ghost or an afterlife, and “The Wavemaker Falters” restates the title story’s guilt and haunting in a smaller key, so that one of the two could go with little lost. “Bounty” carries its journey through a run of encounters, several of which could go without the argument changing. Tight in the parts, porous in the whole.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in an economy of service and spectacle, the worker at the bottom is made the instrument of the cruelty that keeps him employed, and the language of management, cheerful, euphemistic and procedural, is the means by which he consents. The title story’s narrator keeps quiet about a hired killer to keep his place; the raccoon firm calls its clubbing relocation, and its fattest employee does the clubbing. Beside this the book finds that kindness survives in the abject, at a cost: a widower gives away his own memories. The past itself is for sale, a war reenacted for gate receipts while its dead walk unpaid. Thirty years on it reads as more exact, not less. Held back because satire states its finding loudly and several times over in the same terms, and part of the yield is a mood of bleak comedy rather than a meaning.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation is rare, and it comes at the ends. The close of the title story is the book’s height: the murdered narrator, now a spirit, moves among the living wishing to enter their hearts and turn them, a pathos the deadpan has held back until then and spends at once. “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” reaches a quieter height when its narrator empties himself of his wife for an old woman’s comfort. Terror rises in the title story’s killings and in the violence of “Bounty”. But the dominant register is comic deadpan, which caps height by design, and the grotesque, which trades the sublime for the absurd; between the endings the book stays on the plain, and its heights are few.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Myth is evoked in strong figures and built in few. The ghosts of a family who lived on the land in the 1860s, walking a park that sells their war, are the past that will not stay sold, and the title story comes nearest to building: a purgatory with a gift shop, in which the narrator’s death completes the haunting he has watched. The mocked and finally violent employee of “The 400-Pound CEO” is a holy fool turned avenger; “Bounty” borrows the quest for a lost sister across a broken land, and its caste of the Flawed carries the old shape of the marked and the enslaved. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that these patterns are summoned by single stories rather than carried across the book, and the figures are types of one class more than archetypes.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Vonnegut’s dark comic fable, Barthelme’s absurdist story, Gogol’s abject clerks, and the workshop realism of Carver and the writers around him, against which a new American story of 1996 was measured. The turn grafts the language of corporate management and a lightly displaced near future onto the first-person confession of a working man, and joins satire’s cruelty to an open moral tenderness. Against the minimal realism and the cool irony of its decade that was a real departure, a voice and not an accent. The stake was real: a first book, in a market that rewarded realism, built on ghosts, theme parks and invented futures, at constant risk of sentiment on one side and the gag on the other. Held below the top because Vonnegut and Barthelme had cleared most of the ground, and the near-future satire is an old mode turned rather than a new one made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The first-person voice is the instrument: the narrators think in the idiom of their employers, procedural, upbeat and evasive, so that the system the book exposes is found inside the mind that tells it. Told in the third person, the stories would show exploitation from outside and lose their finding, that consent is spoken in the victim’s own words. The displaced near future is the second instrument: moved a step from the present, the workplace shows its logic without the cover of the ordinary. The short form fits lives seized at the moment their arrangement fails. Held off the top because a collection is additive: the stories share one shape and could stand in another order, and “Bounty” stretches the voice over a length its form does not compel.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and thirty years supply some. The book is reread more than it was at first, for its author’s later standing and for its prescience: the theme park, the precarious worker and the euphemism of the firm have come to look like forecasts. The stories leave questions open: whether the narrators’ kindness redeems their complicity or excuses it, whether the ghosts are judgment or consolation. Against that, much of the yield is taken on first reading. The satire’s targets are legible at once, the jokes do not renew as jokes, and the moral turns, once known, are known. A share of the return the book receives is return to its author rather than to it.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the American short story. The intrinsic force is real: the book made a voice the story had not had, the working man’s confession spoken in the dialect of management and set a step into the future, and showed that the absurdist fable could carry tenderness without losing its edge. That enlarges the story’s possibilities rather than reorganising them, and its materials were Vonnegut’s and Barthelme’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner first appeared here and passed into writing programmes and into a fiction of corporate absurdity, but most of that reach runs through Saunders’s later books, Tenth of December (2013) and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and through his teaching. Delayed reach is credited at a discount, and reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the book.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty years, on what has been shown. The book survives whole, as published. It has stayed in print, reissued and kept in view as its author’s standing rose, and its title story is anthologised and taught; but its presence is a first book’s, narrower than a novel’s, and owes much to the later books. Its surface is in part a topical satire, the downsized workplace and the theme parks of the 1990s, which is the surface the axis penalises. The charge is lightened because the satire has outlived its occasion and is read now as forecast, not as period. Three decades demonstrate less than centuries, and the narrower presence and the topical surface are both charged.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice, and it is load-bearing: the narrators’ sentences, built of jargon, hope and evasion, are exact enough that the book’s argument lives in their grammar, and the comic timing, the flat statement that lands a beat after the outrage, is precise. The compression is a craft of its own: a marriage, a debt, a crime, carried in a few pages by what a narrator lets slip. The endings are placed with skill. Three charges: the narrating voice is nearly one voice across the book, so that the narrators blur; some jokes are broad, and the near-future furniture is sometimes laid on as gag; and “Bounty” is uneven, its picaresque middle slack beside the stories’ tension. A making load-bearing throughout, with real faults that fall on a share of the book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the book: the man at the bottom of a failing enterprise is made the agent of its cruelty, and his decency, which he cannot afford, is the one thing in him the enterprise does not own. Take the two most distant elements, the ghosts of the 1860s family in the title story and the caste of the Flawed in the future America of “Bounty”. They obey the same law: past and future are both for sale, and the bodies in them are counted as stock. The ghosts are given the same procedural flatness as the gate receipts, so the supernatural and the economic share one physics. What holds the figure is range: the tone runs from deadpan to grotesque, the class is one class, and the law, never broken, is tested over a narrow field. Narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged on what one book of six stories and a novella holds. Labour is its ground: the job and the fear of losing it are in every piece. The economy, as spectacle and service. Consciousness, in each narrator’s evasions. The family: wives, children, a dead wife, a lost sister. History, as the Civil War made a product. The body, in obesity, injury and the deformities that make a caste in “Bounty”. The afterlife, in ghosts and a spirit. One law and one vantage join them. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what is thin: the state appears in “Bounty” and in the police, and otherwise as absence; the sacred is ghosts without a theology; the natural order is a theme park’s lawn. The orders lie close together, one class in one economy, seen from the bottom.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.5, then The Imperishable at 8.3 and The Living Form at 8.1. A first person built of jargon, hope and evasion, exact enough that the argument lives in its grammar, with a comic timing that lands the flat statement a beat after the outrage; a book that survives whole and in print after thirty years, its satire read now as forecast; and a form in which the employer’s idiom inside the narrator’s mind is itself the finding.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 7.2: strong figures, the ghosts who walk a park that sells their war, the holy fool turned avenger, the marked caste, summoned inside single stories and carried across none; and orders held close together, one class in one economy, with the state thin, the sacred a matter of ghosts and the natural order a lawn. Next above them, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 7.4: heights that come only at the ends, and a yield largely taken on first reading.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Swerve at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, The Sublime, 7.4, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, published by Random House, New York, in 1996: his first book, six stories and a novella, scored as one book in the form first published. The pieces argued from on this page are “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, “The 400-Pound CEO”, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz”, “The Wavemaker Falters” and the novella “Bounty”; the book also holds “Isabelle” and “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”, on which no judgment here rests. Prefaces and forewords to later reissues are not part of the work, and Saunders’s later books are named only as evidence of the book’s reach and survival, never credited to it. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, none of its sentences is quoted, and every axis is judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. The stories are described from memory, at the level of their premises and turns, and are paraphrased; finer detail of plot and the names of characters are not given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the order of the pieces, the length of the first edition, the magazines in which stories first appeared, the book’s commendations and prizes, and the record of its influence on later writers, are not given. Citations are by story.