THIS WAS THE first collection of Sunders stories that I was not sure I liked.
Saunders has had from the beginning of his career a strong vein of stories exploring worker alienation by presenting the routines, often irksome and humiliating, of people doing the less glamorous jobs of the "entertainment" industry. The job of providing "fun" is not much fun, Saunders has repeatedly pointed out; ironically, the very activities of generating entertainment for others underlines what an inequitable system capitalism is. Early masterpieces like "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia" are perfect examples.
This strand in Saunders's fiction took a dark, dystopian turn in "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" (in his previous collection, The Tenth of December), in which young women from poorer countries were strung up as decorations on suburban lawns.
Even darker and more dystopian is this collection's title story, the volume's first and longest and one of the four not previously published in the New Yorker. In "Liberation Day," some people have actually sold off their neural autonomy in order to perform scripts by their...owners, I guess we would have to say?...who thus can design their own private entertainments.
Saunders's story is from the point of view of one of the performers, and gets into some expected sexual harassment territory and a not at all expected militant intervention led by the owners' son.
I found the whole scenario difficult to buy into and wide of its satiric targets.
The volume's other stories were more engaging--"Mom of Bold Action" was especially good at how we navigate the contradictions of family life, as "A Thing at Work"was about how we navigate those of the workplace--but "Liberation Day" put a hitch in stride, so to speak, for the whole volume. I will still read the next one, but I found this collection mildly disappointing, given Saunders's usual level of excellence.
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