I spent most of last night and this morning shunning the Things I Ought to Be Doing and instead read The Braindead Megaphone, George's Saunders's excellent new collection of essays. It occurs to me that often when I read Saunders I'm never quite sure afterwards if I liked what I read—but I've lately decided that this is a good thing. Saunders's writing gets under your skin, even (especially?) when the words he writes aren't necessarily the words you might have wished that he would write.

I mean this "not necessarily" in at least two senses: sometimes I find Saunders a bit naive, his prose too easy, and other times I think he's tried too hard to make a simple issue complicated and multi-perspectival. And sometimes, of course, he manages to peel back my skin, twist open my skull, and expose my very own grey matter to the world at large, saying it (whatever it is) exactly how it is.

But no matter which Saunders I wind up with, I'm never, ever sorry to have read him.

Most of the essays in The Braindead Megaphone, like the title essay discussed a few days ago, revolve around the uses and misuses of language, roughly half concerned with media criticism and the vacuity of political discourse in contemporary America and the other with short readings of what Sauders sees as seminal literary texts in his development as a writer and thinker: Johnny Tremain, Slaughterhouse-Five, Donald Barthelme's "The School," and Huck Finn, with that essay being perhaps my favorite in the book.

Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privelege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.

The few deviations from this strong organizing principle make the book on the whole slightly worse, in my opinion, even though several of these are quite good and one (his article about immigration and the Minuteman from GQ) is another strong contender for my favorite essay in the book:

If this isn't the essential American story, I don't know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.

Did he get it?

Yes, he did, God bless him.

Likewise, the pieces on the six-month-fasting Buddha Boy, Dubai, and "Ask the Optimist!" are certainly interesting pieces in their own rights (the former two considerably moreso than the last) but don't seem to fit quite right in this book. I much prefer the pieces on language itself and the assumptions (political and otherwise) it directs us to make, as in, for instance, "Thought Experiment," a rumination on essentialism and the genetic lottery and the way we think and talk about each other, or "A Brief Study of the British," which despite being still another travelogue has a lot to say about English as well as the English.

This fixation on collection-unity may, in all fairness, be entirely my hangup, but as you may recall from my thoughts about Consider the Lobster I've gotten to a point where I need my collections to have something to say beyond "This is a new book by ______!" The Braindead Megaphone, in the main, definitely has something to say, and that something is important, and I sincerely hope the book finds market penetration into areas outside the already vibrant Saunders Nation. (Oprah, are you listening?) This is precisely the sort of conversation the country needs to be having right now: about language, about politics, about recognition and ethics and empathy and what it means, really, to be good. I hope we're finally ready.