{"id":44346,"date":"2013-01-07T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=44346"},"modified":"2013-01-29T03:17:39","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T08:17:39","slug":"civilwarland-in-bad-decline-preface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/07\/civilwarland-in-bad-decline-preface\/","title":{"rendered":"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline<\/em>: Preface"},"content":{"rendered":"

We loved Joel Lovell\u2019s profile<\/a> of George Saunders in yesterday\u2019s <\/em>Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders\u2019s preface to the new edition of <\/em>CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full.<\/em><\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story.<\/p>\n

I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived.<\/p>\n

We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): \u201cThanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.\u201d And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager\u2019s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book.<\/p>\n

This book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cCapitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,\u201d wrote Terry Eagleton, and that was certainly true of my body at that time. It was being plundered of its sensuality every day. I had an engineering degree but was working as a tech writer. I had earned a reputation as the go-to guy where document covers were concerned. I was good at taping figures into place on frame sheets. I spent a lot of time at the photocopier, producing copies of the reports I had just edited, so we could send them to Kodak or the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who, we suspected, often filed them without having read them. I was gaining weight, losing energy, had grown a consolation ponytail, would go home sore in my ankles and knees from walking what felt like miles on the thin carpeting that ran over our concrete floors.<\/p>\n

There was a lot going on at home during those years, too. My wife, Paula, and I had gotten engaged after dating for three weeks. She became pregnant on the honeymoon, then went into labor at four months. She was put on total bed rest and required to take a drug (since outlawed by the FDA) to suppress her contractions. This happened again during her second pregnancy. So, while I was writing this book, we had two baby daughters at home, each made doubly precious by how close we\u2019d come to losing her. We didn\u2019t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we\u2019d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility.<\/p>\n

At one point our second car broke and we couldn\u2019t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I\u2019d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I\u2019d dash through the atrium, into the men\u2019s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.<\/p>\n

But seriously: those were<\/em> the days.<\/p>\n

Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy colonial houses orange with firelight, I\u2019d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

We managed to buy a house. It was small but sweet, and the four of us lived there, happily. What a thing it was, to suddenly have a real life happening to us, to be in over our heads but glad about it. The gratitude I was feeling nudged me to the edge of a thought precipice: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen?<\/p>\n

And I knew the answer was yes, of course, all the time, every day.<\/p>\n

Which raised a second question, one that I now see as being at the heart of this book: Why is the world so harsh to those who are losing? Sensing how close we were to the edge financially (we lived check to check, were running up huge credit card debt), feeling ourselves bringing up the back of the pack in terms of what kind of life we were making for our daughters relative to the lives of their peers, I realized for the first time, in my gut, how harsh life could be and how little it cared if someone failed.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong: it wasn\u2019t the Gulag. But I was puzzled by how difficult it was proving for me (a nice guy, an educated guy, a guy who loved his wife and kids) to put together a middle-class, or even lower-middle-class, livelihood for our family, and what it was costing me in terms of personal grace.<\/p>\n

The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy. If life could be this harsh\/grueling\/boring for someone who\u2019d had all the advantages, what must it be like for someone who hadn\u2019t? A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else. They, too, wanted to be happy. They, too, wanted to succeed. Maybe they had people they loved at home. They, too, were doing some weird uninteresting job in order to ensure the security and happiness of those beloved people of theirs, and yet\u00a0…<\/p>\n

And yet there were people sleeping on benches and muttering to themselves and getting fired, and there were nasty divorces and men slamming their fists into the sides of their cars when they thought no one was around.<\/p>\n

It was as if I\u2019d been driving along a highway littered with broken-down cars, blithely unconcerned, then heard a clunk from under my own hood.<\/p>\n

What? I\u2019d begun to think. Me, too, possibly?<\/p>\n

All of this made its way slantwise into this book, although I\u2019m not sure how aware of it I was at the time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

It was a weird world I found myself living in then, a world I\u2019d been trying to avoid all my life: a world of paper shuffling and cubicles and a cheap little tie I would wear whenever \u201cthe client\u201d was coming in, a world through which a burned-coffee smell would emanate late in the afternoons; a world of long white hallways and generic\/minimal furniture (no art on the walls, no flowers in vases), a world of five-hundred-page reports with titles like \u201cLong-Term Study of Possible Effects of Alleged Benzene Spill on Indoor Air Quality on Riley Street,\u201d which I would write and\/or edit in the small one-computer room I shared with my officemate, Dawn Wendt (and God bless you, Dawn, for all the times you sensed an edgy marital phone conversation coming on and left the office, and God bless me, for all the times I did the same for you).<\/p>\n

Then, at the end of the day: the long bike or bus ride home, a precious hour or two with Paula and the girls.<\/p>\n

I remember sitting in that office in my sad khakis, watching a storm approach\u2014the darkening sky over the Rustic Village Apartments, the way the crap in the parking lot would start skittering around. A tree in a planter in the indoor atrium would drop a few leaves now and then that would stay there on the tile, proof that the tree was real. We\u2019d note the sapling on \u201cour\u201d berm (i.e., the berm just outside our window) turning gold in October: it was like a mini-autumn, and all of the usual fall associations would rise up in me, filling me with longing, and there I was, a former big American dreamer, reading and rereading a report in which I could summon up zero interest, except that most basic one: the interest that came of the knowledge that if I didn\u2019t read that bastard again and again and fix all the mistakes I\u2019d made, I was going to look bad, and if I looked bad enough times, I\u2019d be gone.<\/p>\n

Still, it was sweet work, being for the benefit of our family.<\/p>\n

As you approached our office, which was in a place called Corporate Woods, you passed a T.G.I. Friday\u2019s and a highway, and beside the highway was a swamp, and in the swamp reeds were usually a few snagged fast-food bags, and outside our tinted front door was one of those sand-filled ashtrays, around which the same two or three people from the mysterious company upstairs would stand smoking, always talking of someone named Sheila, who was making a huge miscalculation.<\/p>\n

Our building looked something like a spaceship, a black glass spaceship, and out front of it\u2014the one nod to aesthetics\u2014was a sculpture, which we referred to as The Snot<\/em>, because that\u2019s what it looked like, a giant gray snot, a snot that, vaguely man-shaped, greeted us at the beginning and end of every working day.<\/p>\n

Some days, coming in, I\u2019d find myself mumbling, \u201cHi, Snot.\u201d<\/p>\n

In retrospect I was lucky\u2014lucky to have my lame, black-and-white, museumish idea of literature, in which it was always 1931, denied me. This sent me in search (in spite of myself) of a prose style that wasn\u2019t full of shit given the life I was leading, a style that felt truly American\u2014 that took into account the Hemingway-Copland-Steinbeck-Ives America I loved (red, white, and blue bunting draped above a white-painted porch, a marching band playing in the distance) but also this new America in which I was just becoming a full participant: a place where paucity reduced a person, fear of failure produced neuroses, where everyone became a freak via material obsession, where there were no artifacts of previous cultures, no ancient ruins, just expedience-formed vistas (the old mill was now a Starbucks, and when the Starbucks kids went out for a smoke, they did so leaning against the fence of the pioneer graveyard, the shadow of a tall stone angel slicing across the parking stripes), a style as angular, comic, dorky, and heartfelt as the Rochesterians I saw falling asleep on the bus, or living up near Kodak Park in the shadow of the methylene chloride pipes, or plunking around in their snowy yards wielding roof rakes as I sped by on the canal path in my goggles and spaceman boots.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d always loved Hemingway and all through grad school had been doing some version of a Hemingway imitation. If I got tired of that, I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel had lived in Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which always ended up sounding, to me, like Carver.<\/p>\n

Following my Hemingway\/Babel\/Carver years, I embarked on a few James Joyce years, and then a Malcolm Lowry half year, during which I wrote a book called \u201cLa Boda de Eduardo.\u201d The title\u2014which I believe translates roughly as \u201cEd\u2019s Wedding\u201d\u2014will give the reader some idea of the literary power of the work itself. It is the story of a wedding\u2014Ed\u2019s wedding, to be exact\u2014that takes place in Mexico. Lots of people come to the wedding and are described in Joycean\/Lowryesque prose, which, in my hands, meant: as few verbs as possible, so as to ensure that nothing appeared to be happening, and if something inadvertently did happen, it didn\u2019t happen with any clarity. To make up for the scarcity of verbs, I utilized lots of compound words. There was no drama at the wedding except that my friend got married, and the novel reflects this. The novel was seven hundred pages; I cut it back to a very efficient 250, rendering it even more difficult to understand. Then I gave it to my wife to read. All of these months I\u2019d been assuring her that our long familial time in the desert was nearly over. She was \u201csitting on a gold mine.\u201d I gave her the manuscript, then promised to be gone all afternoon. Minutes later I peeked in, as any writer might have done. She would have been on about page 10 by then. Was she rapt, were tears of joy running down her face? No. She wasn\u2019t even reading anymore. She was just sitting at the table, head in hands, in a posture of total defeat that seemed to be saying: All of those hours, for this<\/em>? Honey, where are the verbs? Are they in a separate document or what? And what\u2019s with all of these compound words, this wordbanter, this disclarifying clapplemuddle?<\/p>\n

A bad couple of days followed.<\/p>\n

But I knew she was right. I hadn\u2019t loved that book either. It was surprisingly easy to put \u201cLa Boda de Eduardo\u201d in a desk drawer, where it still resides today, furiously exclaiming that the tortillasmell is rising from the mudhuts, the bridegroom is approaching in his dustsuit, redfaced, loveslumped.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

5.<\/p>\n

One day not long after the collapse of \u201cLa Boda de Eduardo\u201d I was asked to take notes during a Radian conference call. There weren\u2019t many notes to take. With nothing to do, I started writing these Seussian poems, which I would then illustrate. They were despondent and minimal and gross and, for a change, funny. I wrote maybe ten of these and, when I got home, threw them down on the dining room table and went off to mow the lawn. When I came back in, Paula was\u00a0…\u00a0laughing. With pleasure. Real pleasure. It was the first positive reaction to my work I\u2019d gotten from anyone in a long time. She wasn\u2019t saying the poems were \u201cinteresting,\u201d she didn\u2019t have that workshoppy look on her face, the look we all get when we are trying to think of something nice to say about something that has left us cold. She was happy, she was experiencing pleasure, she even seemed to want to read more.<\/p>\n

Suddenly it was as if I\u2019d been getting my ass kicked in an alley somewhere and realized I\u2019d had one arm behind my back. All of my natural abilities, I saw, had been placed, by me, behind a sort of scrim. Among these were: humor, speed, the scatological, irreverence, compression, naughtiness. All I had to do was tear down the scrim and allow those abilities to come to the table.<\/p>\n

And writing might be fun again.<\/p>\n

That was the day I started this book, essentially.<\/p>\n

Many years before, I\u2019d written a story called \u201cA Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room,\u201d which was set in one of those highway \u201cMystery Spots.\u201d I sold the story to the Northwest Review<\/em> and used it to get into Syracuse\u2014and then put it aside as an aberration. It wasn\u2019t \u201creal,\u201d it was silly, Hemingway would have hated it, etc., etc. Somewhere around the time of the conference room revelation, my friend Pat Pacino came to town and, in a burst of candor, told me that this story was still the best thing I\u2019d ever written, all those grad school stories notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

That hurt. But it also rang true.<\/p>\n

So I dusted that story off and resolved to do a stone-cold plagiarism of it\u2014or, let\u2019s say, a reworking<\/em> of it\u2014with the same basic plot but set in a different theme park. The resulting story, \u201cThe Wavemaker Falters,\u201d was the first one I wrote for this book. Working on it was fun<\/em>: for the first time in years, I knew what to do. I had no idea what it was \u201cabout\u201d or what it was teaching or espousing or anything like that. I just, at every turn, had some feelings about how I might make it better. As goofy as the story was, as far-fetched as its premise seemed, I could feel and see the people in it as real people, and I cared about them. What a relief that was: to work with certainty, toward fun, just for the hell of it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

6.<\/p>\n

I set foot in my first theme park in 1969. It was Six Flags over Texas, outside Dallas. I loved it so thoroughly that, all the way back to Chicago in the car, I conspired with my sister to build a scale model of it.<\/p>\n

Well, that never happened. But I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place, thinking: Wow, someone did<\/em> this, someone made<\/em> all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds.<\/p>\n

In a sense, these stories were that scale model, much delayed.<\/p>\n

But also, while working on \u201cThe Wavemaker Falters,\u201d I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved, the faux-Hemingway element having been disallowed by the setting. Placing a story in a theme park became a way of ensuring that the story would lurch over into the realm of the comic, which meant I would be able to finish it, and it would not collapse under the conceptual\/thematic weight I tended to put on a so-called realist story.<\/p>\n

I loved making these places up, and even now will still flash on certain vistas within them, vistas that never existed except in my mind, for a few months, back then, at Radian.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

7.<\/p>\n

The book formed slowly, one or two stories a year over seven long years. Entire office eras started and ended, managers came and went. Whole rooms at Radian were emptied, repurposed. A corridor got lopped off and reframed and absorbed by our neighboring company, a mob-related outfit that claimed to sell penny stocks and whose president once fired a guy by beating the shit out of him in the vestibule near The Snot<\/em>. People married, cheated, remarried. World Series were played, communism vanished, somewhere the Internet was invented, our kids worked their way up the grades, learning to read, catch, sing. Who can remember what was actually going on?<\/p>\n

Mostly I was using whatever story I happened to have going at the time to get me through the day and give me some minimal sense of control and mastery. They were a secret source of sustenance. If I got a few good lines in the morning, that made the whole rest of the day better.<\/p>\n

That much I remember.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

8.<\/p>\n

When I was in my twenties I had this plan to go to El Salvador and write about the experience. I had no money, didn\u2019t speak Spanish, but this was \u201cmy dream.\u201d I stopped by one day to see a friend of mine but found only his father home. I\u2019d never spoken to this man before, not really. He was a truck driver, a father of eight, always went around in a white T-shirt and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses. But this day, we talked. I told him about my El Salvador plan, expecting him to find it indulgent. But instead he said, \u201cYou know what? You have to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d I said, with the force of revelation. \u201cI do. I really do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you know why?\u201d he said. \u201cBecause you know who you\u2019re going to blame if you don\u2019t?\u201d<\/p>\n

I did know.<\/p>\n

\u201cMyself,\u201d I said with a knowing smile.<\/p>\n

\u201cBullshit,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ll blame your wife and\u00a0 kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

I often thought of this conversation when I was stealing time from Radian to write this book. If I didn\u2019t, I told myself, I was going to become a bitter old-fart version of myself, blaming Paula and the girls.<\/p>\n

So I stole like a mother. I wrote in the bathroom, I printed using the company printer, I turned away from my Kodak report to jot things down, I edited while waiting for an offsite groundwater remediation system to purge, I sometimes blew off a full afternoon when I was feeling ripe, although usually, when that happened, I\u2019d take work home, just to be fair.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

9.<\/p>\n

In grad school I had grown suspicious of conventional literary beauty, wary of what I thought of as, for example, the literary triple descriptor:<\/em> \u201cTodd sat at the black table, the ebony plane, the dark-hued bearer of various glasses and plates, whose white, disk-shaped, saucer-like presences mocking his futility, his impotence, his inability to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christ, I had come to feel, just say it: \u201cTodd sat at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or better yet, cut that, too. Why do we need to know that Todd is sitting at a table? Let me know when Todd actually does<\/em> something. And it better not be \u201craising a cup to his lips\u201d or \u201cpausing thoughtfully to let Randy\u2019s insight fully inform him.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was feeling a little cranky back then, re: prose.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

10.<\/p>\n

One of the new stories, \u201cDowntrodden Mary\u2019s Failed Campaign of Terror,\u201d was accepted by Quarterly West<\/em>. Paula and I went out for a celebratory dinner that cost us twice what the magazine paid. I sent \u201cThe Wavemaker Falters,\u201d over the transom, to The New Yorker<\/em>, which rejected it with a nice (signed!) letter that I, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, showed around proudly at work, even to one of our more straitlaced managers, who said, \u201cUh, yeah, Georgeman? We\u2019ve been noticing that you\u2019ve been producing your\u00a0…\u00a0literary thingies<\/em> using corporate resources. And that\u2019s going to need to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what you think, I thought.<\/p>\n

The new stories kept getting accepted. Finally The New Yorker<\/em> took one of them, \u201cOffloading for Mrs. Schwartz.\u201d I heard the news at a Microtel in Watertown, New York, where we were doing a study of what was called \u201can historic paint dump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paula went around to several doctors\u2019 and dentists\u2019 office, collecting old New Yorker<\/em>s, and strung these into a sort of banner, and under the banner the four of us had cake, to celebrate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

11.<\/p>\n

I expect that my younger self\u2014the self who wrote this book\u2014would have hated the idea of an author\u2019s note. No explanations necessary, he would have said; all meanings are contained in the stories themselves. Explanation is reductive, reading visceral. The stories are either doing the work or they\u2019re not. Don\u2019t yap it up. And I agree with all of that. And I agree with all of that. But I\u2019m older now and feeling nostalgic and\u2014<\/p>\n

I just wrote and deleted this phrase: I really miss those days.<\/em><\/p>\n

I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn\u2019t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

12.<\/p>\n

After the book finally came out, I got a phone call from an old next-door neighbor in Chicago, whom I\u2019ll call \u201cMrs. L.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI read your book,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAh,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

There was a long silence.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you like it?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cIt worried me. I\u2019m worried about you. You seem like a very unhappy person. Like the guy who takes out the garbage, late at night, miserable and grumbling.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t quite know what to say to this and waited for some sort of softening praise, of the \u201cBut still, wow, you published a book<\/em>\u201d variety.<\/p>\n

But no.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m worried,\u201d she said. \u201cThat book is not like you. You were always such a happy little guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wait a minute, I thought once she\u2019d hung up: I\u2019m happy. I\u2019m one of the happiest people I know. My book is not unhappy. My book is funny. My book tells, uh, dark truths. I\u2019m a hopeful person. Writing this book was a happy, hopeful act.<\/p>\n

And that was true. I\u2019d been plenty hopeful while writing it. I\u2019d been hopeful that I might finish it, and that it would be published, and that its publication might make life happier for the four of us; I\u2019d been hopeful that Paula and I would stay happy and together over the years to come, hopeful that that our kids would grow up to be wonderful adults.<\/p>\n

It was, we did, they are.<\/p>\n

But what bothered me at the time was that I could feel that this happy ending wasn\u2019t necessarily so, not for me, and not for other people.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet,\u201d wrote Chekhov, \u201cto remind him, by his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, sooner or later, life will show him its claws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s it, I thought after that phone call. My book is\u2014you know what my book is? My book is the unhappy man in me saying to the happy man: \u201cThere but for the grace of God go you.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a nice idea, but rereading the book, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s true. The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen then they\u2019d need to be, if that was the book\u2019s simple intention. The stories are mean, in places. They\u2019re occasionally nasty. They are abrupt and telegraphic and odd. Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters\u2019 asses.<\/p>\n

Ah well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe writer can chose what he writes about,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor once said, \u201cbut he cannot choose what he is able to make live.\u201d<\/p>\n

I guess that\u2019s what I should have told Mrs. L.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

13.<\/p>\n

When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes.<\/p>\n

Hemingway Mountain, let\u2019s say.<\/p>\n

He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway.<\/p>\n

At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else\u2019s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life short, omitting things he knows are true, adding in things he knows aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

If he\u2019s lucky enough to realize this, he trudges back down off Hemingway Mountain and starts over again.<\/p>\n

Ah, look: Toni Morrison Mountain. That\u2019s more like it.<\/p>\n

Rinse, lather, repeat.<\/p>\n

Then one day\u2014maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil\u2014he snaps. No more imitation. That\u2019s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding\u00a0…\u00a0like himself. Or at least he doesn\u2019t sound like anyone else, exactly. A new mountain has appeared; he can actually see it, his name on it.<\/p>\n

But wow, is it ever small.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not even really a mountain. It\u2019s like\u00a0…\u00a0it\u2019s like a little dung heap or something.<\/p>\n

Okay, okay, he thinks and goes over and stands on it.<\/p>\n

The work he does there is not the work of his masters. It is less. It is more modest; it is messier. It is small and minor.<\/p>\n

But at least it\u2019s his.<\/p>\n

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.<\/p>\n

So be it.<\/p>\n

Better than being stalled out forever.<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll make a collection of lower halves of Barbie dolls and call that a book.<\/p>\n

And the thing is: it is<\/em> a book. That\u2019s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.<\/p>\n

A book doesn\u2019t have to do everything, I remember saying to myself back then, as a form of consolation; it just has to do something<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So, although this book is short and took seven long years to write, and is truncated and halting, and is, yes, dark and maybe even a little sick in places, I remember the years during which it was being written as some of the richest and most magical of my life, full of hope and love and aspiration and the satisfaction of, finally, making something happen.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0Civilwarland in Bad Decline<\/em>, by George Saunders (Random House; November 2012). \u00a9 2012 George Saunders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We loved Joel Lovell\u2019s profile of George Saunders in yesterday\u2019s Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders\u2019s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full. 1. This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9674,9671,9672,3527,2265,9673,6912,635,771,263,9675,75],"class_list":["post-44346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-civilwarland-in-bad-decline","tag-excerpts","tag-george-saundres","tag-hemingway","tag-isaac-babel","tag-joel-lovell","tag-malcolm-lowry","tag-memoir","tag-new-york-state","tag-raymond-carver","tag-syracuse","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface by George Saunders<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 7, 2013 \u2013 We loved Joel Lovell\u2019s profile of George Saunders in yesterday\u2019s Times Magazine. 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