George Saunders is a writer whose work brings immense pleasure. In his stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire, one encounters tremendous verbal energy, inventiveness, and, especially, humor. Saunders's humor can reduce a reader to uncontrollable laughter. When teaching either of his two volumes of fiction, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) or Pastoralia (2000), I often feel an urgency in class to read aloud long passages from his stories. This is fiction you want to share with others and a voice that seems to want to get off the page and fill a room.
At the heart of Saunders's success is his talent for depicting the internal lives of his characters, capturing the mind as it speaks to itself: fantasizing, strategizing, countering, reversing, worrying, doubting, and continually vacillating. Sometimes described as "losers," Saunders's characters have cruddy jobs and live in "dangerous crapholes" with their demanding mothers and parasitic relatives, yet they fantasize about changing their lives through dreams of fame, wealth, and sex. While failure and pathos color his fictional world, compassion and humor work to balance his vision.
During a recent visit to Cincinnati, Saunders was interviewed by James Schiff, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and author of several books on contemporary American fiction. What follows is based on an interview that took place before an audience on the campus of the University of Cincinnati on November 19, 2002.