“‘I pour my life’s blood into this place,’” the narrator’s father says in the early story Isabelle (1994), “‘and you offer me half what I paid?’ ‘Market forces at work’,” the estate agent replies, a line that is virtually impossible to argue with, both within the confines of the story and without. The powerlessness of the individual haunts his stories, the sense of citizens being to multinationals as flies to wanton boys. Aside from being one of the funniest writers around, it is difficult to think of anyone better than he is at describing how commercial imperatives deform individual lives. Saunders’s America isn’t only divided into left and right, but also rich and poor, black and white, and, most notably, the individual and the corporation.
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