George Saunders is always right about American politics
Revisiting "Love Letter"
I want to be George Saunders when I grow up.
He is arguably the greatest living American short story writer, and he is certainly one of the all-time greats. I am not yet either of those things.
With
, he has reconceptualized the idea of the public intellectual. I am known, a little bit, for complaining about sports league governance.By all accounts, Saunders is warm, kind, and generous. I’m working on those.
And he is America’s most incisive political observer and commentator.
I was reminded of the latter fact this week after I returned to his short story “Love Letter,” which takes the form of a letter and is set in a near-future America in which an increasingly authoritarian government threatens democracy and civil liberties. A man, the letter writer, advises his grandson to tread lightly in his opposition to the government. At the same time, “G.Pa” encourages his grandson to to keep up the fight and even offers financial assistance to that end.
Like all great stories, it captures the paradoxical and complex nature of blah blah blah. You just have to read it.
I thought of “Love Letter” because I started writing a story that takes the form of a letter and I am a mere mortal. As the saying goes: good artists copy, but great artists steal. And I was scheduled to attend a writing retreat at L’abbaye de Royaumont outside of Paris. I would have plenty of time to draft what Saunders had inspired. (You, too, can have this life. All you have to do is sacrifice your career and nearly all your income and move away from everyone you know.)
I did not mean for my rereading of “Love Letter” to correspond with Election Day on Tuesday. Zohran Mamdani and a cavalcade of Democrats stopped, for a moment, the U.S.’s backsliding into illiberal democracy and instilled, for the first time in a long time, a sense of political hope. This is, perhaps, the flickering light to which G.Pa refers when he writes in his letter, “In this, you are, and I am, I hope, like cave people, sheltering a small, remaining trace of fire through a dark period.”
One of the many amazing things about “Love Letter” is that Saunders submitted it to the New Yorker in February 2020 (and it was published the following month). Meaning, Saunders wrote it before the outbreak of Covid-19, before the January 6th insurrection, and many years before the second Trump administration, which treats liberties and the rule of law like how its leader treats classified documents.
There is no “better” example of this than recent immigration raids, a disgraceful policy that has stained my country’s history. “Love Letter” anticipated this. “Where is J. now? Do you know? State facility or fed? That may matter,” Saunders writes through the voice of G.Pa. “I expect ‘they’ (loyalists) would (with the power of the courts now behind them) say that although J. is a citizen, she forfeited certain rights and privileges by declining to offer the requested info on G. & M.”
It’s easy to say Saunders predicted the raids. I think a truer, more insightful way to think about it is Saunders sensed that there was a capacity and ability for the government to disappear people, and that capacity and ability didn’t lie within a pathological man. Trump, or any leader, real or imagined, is not named in the story. Rather, that capacity and ability lied—(lies?)—within the national character, within us.
Saunders gets at this notion when G.Pa defends his own little acts of rebellion to creeping authoritarianism. It’s a passage worth quoting in full:
What would you have had me do? What would you have done? I know what you will say: you would have fought. But how? How would you have fought? Would you have called your senator? (In those days, you could still, at least, record your feeble message on a senator’s answering machine without reprisal, but you might as well have been singing or whistling or passing wind into it for all the good it did.) Well, we did that. We called, we wrote letters. Would you have given money to certain people running for office? We did that as well. Would you have marched? For some reason, there were suddenly no marches. Organized a march? Then and now, I did not and do not know how to arrange a march. I was still working full time. This dental thing had just begun. That rather occupies the mind. You know where we live: would you have had me go down to Waterville and harangue the officials there? They were all in agreement with us. At that time. Would you have armed yourself? I would not and will not, and I do not believe you would, either. I hope not. By that, all is lost.
Coursing through G.Pa’s plea is a complicity, and that implies something intentional, which reflects the binary way in which we often frame politics. The problem with Democrats is…
But G.Pa also expresses doubt, ignorance, confusion, pride, comfort, dread, hope, effort, exhaustion, etc, etc. This reflects how life and in turn politics actually are. It’s… complicated. We describe relationships like that because it’s rarely ever one thing, and we sometimes don’t have the tools, experience, or skills to understand or intervene.
In effect, Saunders tells the reader that the Democrats’ problem (or the problem with any political thing) is unknowable and that anyone who claims to know is full of shit. The only thing we can know and control is how we treat others. I mean this in the most mundane and banal and uninteresting way possible. Our politics flow from tiny interpersonal moments, and it’s at that those headwaters that Saunders has long held up the mirror:
How do coworkers, whose jobs are to kill raccoons, treat each other? (“The 400-Pound CEO,” 1994)
How do neighbors—one pathetic, one narcissistic, and two others drowning—treat each other? (“The Falls,” 1996)
How do coworkers, whose jobs are to imitate cavemen, treat each other? (“Pastoralia,” 2000)
How do prisoners, injected with drugs like Verbaluce™, treat each other? (“Escape from Spiderhead,” 2010) (Skip the Netflix movie version, though.)
None of these stories are about politics, but they evoke the political by focusing intensely on the interactions of people. Conversely, “Love Letter” is about politics, but it evokes the personal because it focuses on the relationship between grandfather and grandson. In either construct, Saunders doesn’t pretend to know what the problem is. On the page, he doesn’t wag or point his finger at some perceived issue in real life. All he knows is how these characters interact with one another in this story. Setting: whatever. Plot: who needs it? Theme: bor-ing! The specificity in (fake) Americans is what makes his writing electric and funny and politically relevant, prescient, and timeless.
Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Saunders wrote a journalistic essay for the New Yorker called, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” It is, to me, a classic piece of political reporting, and it still holds up because of the Saundersian specificity.
As Saunders reports, a man from Vermont claims “illegals” are getting all the kitchen jobs, but the man cannot say he knows this for a fact.
A woman from Minnesota, laid off from an executive administration job, complains that “these people, that are from other countries” are getting all the government benefits, but she can’t say for certain that those receiving benefits are illegal immigrants.
“Bill Davis, a funny, genial sales rep in the packaging industry, has nothing against legal immigration but feels that illegal immigration is ‘killing’ the area in Southern California where he lives,” Saunders writes. But Davis offers as proof only conjecture, generalizations, and non sequiturs.
In trying to separate Trump supporters from a perceived Other, Saunders starts asking his interviewees to respond to real, contemporaneous stories—a Dreamer named Noemi facing deportation, a Central American family split up by the government at the border. “In the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying, to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up,” Saunders writes:
It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed. We popped briefly out of zinger mode and began to have some faith in one another, a shared confidence that if we talked long enough, respectfully enough, a solution could be found that might satisfy our respective best notions of who we were.
Then the conversation would drift and everyone would retreat to their ideological foxholes.
After offensive comments or tragic events, rebutting politicians have a tendency of saying, “This is not who we are.” Saunders, in both his fiction and nonfiction, suggests, “Actually, this is exactly who we are. We are doing/have done [fill in the blank].”
Mamdani, for example, delivered in his victory speech a powerful and compelling message about immigrants’ enduring place in New York City. It is factually correct that New York (and the U.S.) would be nothing without immigrants. But is it true that New York City’s immigration history and potential future reflects who we are? As far back as 1790, the U.S. based naturalized citizenship on race, to speak nothing of the institution of slavery. Today, 250 years later, the U.S. is at zero migration on purpose. I’m sure the residents on W. 108th Street in Manhattan between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, who voted two-to-one for Mamdani, agree that that is not who we are! That didn’t stop many in the neighborhood from vehemently opposing, for over a decade, the conversion of a derelict parking garage into affordable housing.
So what do we do with this idea, the specificity of who we are? It’d be trite and not at all like me to suggest that if we were just kinder to each other, then the world (and our politics) would be better (though, they would be). It’d be more like me to blame a billionaire sports team owner. In any event, Saunders again points the way.
In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Saunders’ masterclass on the short story, the word “change” appears no fewer than 101 times. That’s what a story is: something happened, which is to say something changed. But a reader can’t know a change happened—they can’t know a story is being told—if they don’t know the original state, the status quo.
And readers aren’t stupid. Deceptions, generalizations, implausibilities, and even lies that the writer relies on won’t sneak past the bullshit detector. “Many young writers start out with the idea that a story is a place to express their views—to tell the world what they believe,” Saunders writes:
That is, they understand the story as a delivery system for their ideas. I know I felt that way. A story was where I got to set the world straight and achieve glory via the sheer originality of my advanced moral positions. But, as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to “prove” anything.
Storytelling is essential to politics. Storytelling is political. In this context, then, us Americans lie to ourselves about the status quo. We want to get to the end of the story, where we’re a better version of ourselves, whatever we believe that looks like, without facing the facts of who we are today and who we were yesterday and the day before that.
We boast that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants. We also vilify them and, now, effectively ban them. How can we know who we are in this respect when we have never reconciled that tension? Even Obama, who trumpeted the storytelling tenets of hope and change, was careful not to articulate too specifically what he hoped to see change. He (in)famously hedged on same-sex marriage, for instance.
I interpret this as a fear to confront who are in the specific instances in which we interact with others. We are, above all, an insecure people, and for as long as we are insecure we will whiplash between this visionary Democrat and that retrograde Conservative (or vice versa) in a fruitless attempt to fulfill ourselves.
Saunders’ work suggests that the acceptance and security that we so desperately grasp at can only be found from within each one of us, in the trustful hope that others will share in that grace. “Love Letter” is not a polemic. The title of the story is not ironic.
“I want you well. I want you someday to be an old fart yourself, writing a (too) long letter to a (beloved) grandson,” G.Pa/Saunders writes. “In this world, we speak much of courage and not, I feel, enough about discretion and caution. I know how that will sound to you. Let it be. I have lived this long and have the right.”
In that sentiment, expressed between two normal, hopeful, scared Americans, exists all of life. What could be more political than that?
Before you go…
I started a new Substack, one about French football.
Check it out below, and subscribe if interested!
An American in Paris tour de force! The frame of Saunders “Love Letters” for your startling insights suggest how inscription itself is the way to reconciliation.