Q&A: George Saunders

(Credit: Caitlin Saunders)

With three collections of short stories under his belt, a steady teaching gig at Syracuse Univerisity and writing assignments from The New Yorker to GQ, George Saunders has proven himself to be a master of many different forms of literature. All of them, lest we mention, funny enough to split your sides.

Not that he'd say as much himself. His newest book, "The Braindead Megaphone," compiles nonfiction pieces written over the last 10 years. We caught up with him post-book tour, in a state of happy exhaustion, to talk about jobs in Los Angeles, and being the "anti-James Bond."

So we caught you on “Letterman” the other night…
A phrase I never thought I’d hear.

You guys both had pretty interesting hairlines as well.
Oh my God. I just couldn’t believe that I was balder than Letterman! You always carry around this perception of yourself as a 22-year-old, and then you see yourself and go, “Hey, who’s that balding mortician? Wait! He’s saying my words!” I had it cut for that show, but now I’m cultivating this crazy hairdo where the hairline kind of shoots up like a beam of light…

Was that your first TV appearance?
(Laughs) Well, yeah, kinda. I did Charlie Rose, but that was sort of a round-table discussion. But once before, I was on this early morning local show in Madison. The announcer was this bubbly blonde woman, and the whole show was her and one old dude who was running back and forth doing everything else. So the camera comes on, and the announcer gets even more bubbly and she says, “We’re here with George Saunders, who’s a writer!” At that very point my lapel mic falls off. She leans over to put it back on and—this is really early in the morning and I’m barely even awake—she says, “I hope you don’t mind. Let me just touch the magic.” To which I said, “Ah, don’t worry. I do it like three times a week.”

Trying to rein yourself in, and hopefully, everyone will like the persona you’ve designed to show them…
It’s like going on a date with index cards. The cards tell you: "7:05, Flatter Her Outfit." It’s like a security blanket, but you’re shutting out any possibility of real communication. You think, what I want to do in this story is: fill in the blank. Gerald Stern, the poet, said, “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.”

Your new book is comprised of nonfiction pieces over the years. When working on something like “The New Mecca,” did you freak out about having to write 8,000 or so words on Dubai?
Absolutely. It’s like that trick—you want to crank out a lot of words, but you want to keep the quality really high. You go to report it and you realize you just have to skim the surface and hope the surface you choose to skim is somehow, in some distant way, doing justice to the actual place and the actual experience.

You gave the impression of feeling pretty out of place.
I hadn’t traveled in such a long time, and it was partly about going to Dubai but also about figuring how does one behave in this situation. Feeling basically like the anti-James Bond. I didn’t see it like, “I’m going to go over there and discover the whole truth behind this place in a week.” Because in a week one couldn’t, and I certainly couldn’t because I just don’t have that kind of mind.

Whereas others like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe kind of inject their own personality into the surroundings.
Right. Unlike those guys, I don’t really have that much personality.

Really?
I’m very shy, usually. When I travel, I feel mostly like a suburban tourist.

You lived in Los Angeles for a brief period, right?
I was working as doorman in Beverly Hills, which wasn’t physically tough at all, but there was just this feeling of being invisible. I had an idea that it would be fun and that I’d get to meet a bunch of interesting people in the entertainment business. I had good hair then, but I was just this kind of passable-looking guy at the front door. It was a period where I was struggling a lot financially. I was living with a woman that I really liked, but I was failing her in all kinds of just basic, monetary ways. It was maybe the first time that, in a very tiny way, I saw capitalism for what it actually is.

Which is what?
Hobbes said, “That war which is every man against every other man.” And that’s what it is. If you don’t make money, you suffer and your relationships will suffer. And it was interesting to be in the heart of all that luxury and…it was a time that just wasn’t all that pleasant. There’s something psychological about suddenly being rendered invisible.

Why did you end up in L.A. of all places?
Just goofing around. I’d just come back from Asia and I was all Kerouac-ed out. At some point I thought we should just go where all the artistic excitement was. New York didn’t occur to me, but L.A I’d been to before and really liked it. Just looking for something to write about—some kind of crazy immersion thing. In retrospect, of course, it was good. Just not in the way I thought it would be.