"GEORGE SAUNDERS BRINGS MORALITY BACK TO FICTION"
OH YEAH? FUCK YOU!
Corporate communication grifter-gurus counsel against telling a joke to begin a speech. Exceptions can be made if the joke is funny and apposite. So I feel safe in presenting legendary funnyman Albert Brooks doing his impression of George Saunders:
Yes indeedy-do: George Saunders is the Founder and CEO of the Famous Writers School, funded in part by the Church of Famous Writers, and the generous support of Readers Like You. But am I making a joke? Possibly. I could also be deadly serious. (Oh no! It’s not black-and-white!) What might the Comedy Police have to say about it? Am I making fun of a beloved author? I am at least punching up—but “beloved” is just a hop, skip, and jump from “cult leader,” and that means I had better watch my step.
This caught my eye just before I started typing: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/opinion/harry-potter-millenials-liberalism.html
Because I am lean and agile, not fat and rusty, I include two paragraphs here:
“We were the children who queued outside bookstores and cinemas at midnight. We got Harry Potter tattoos, threw Harry Potter-themed weddings and named our children after characters from the novels — baby names like Hermione, Luna and Draco.
“We interpreted our politics through the lens of the wizarding world, comparing those we disagreed with to the books’ main villain, Lord Voldemort, and carrying signs with slogans like “Dumbledore’s Army” and “Hermione wouldn’t stand for this!” at women’s marches. And some of us even took deeper moral cues from the books, reading them like a new Bible, treating the works as sacred texts with religious teachings to convey. Some fans experienced J.K. Rowling’s controversial comments on transgender rights as a betrayal precisely because they had seen her as one of our generation’s most influential moral guides.”
The review of his new novel, “George Saunders Brings Morality Back to Fiction” https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/01/george-saunders-moral-novel-vigil/685772/ is very troubling. (There is also an interview in which the participants demonstrate how convivial they are, along the lines of “It’s so cool to be moral!” “I know, right???” “And cheeseburgers are so great!” Light laughter. “Totally.” Laughter heavy with irony, as fast-food is, you know…immoral. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/01/george-saunders-on-his-new-book-vigil/685698/ )
Never mind the reviewer’s half-baked assertions, like how it was once common to look to novels for moral guidance and life-wisdom, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or his admission that he bails on books that don’t teach him how to live. For every Pamela there were ten Tom Joneses and Tristram Shandys, and that’s just the 18th century.
Never mind that, and consider instead how wide the door is already open to Comstock-style morality clauses (e.g. a Simon & Schuster contract, and here’s an excellent review of such by E. Lily Wu: https://quillette.com/2026/01/30/a-history-of-morality-clauses-anthony-comstock-free-speech-cancel-culture/ ), and how morally superior Saunders’s call for morality is.
Whose morality are we talking about? His? The kind that steams the windows of the cozy seminar room looking out on a snowy wood? Suitable for Chautauqua sermons? Mine? I think calls for morality in any context are immoral—especially when blatant self-promotion is disguised and served up as a choice between good and evil.
Apparently no one remembers the ridicule heaped on John Gardner when he tried this gambit in the late 70s/early 80s with his On Moral Fiction. Morality grifters certainly applauded it (and demanded as well, I’m not kidding, that poetry be “cheerful” a la Soviet Socialist Realism) but here’s what Gore Vidal said about it: Gardner was the “late apostle to the lowbrows, a sort of Christian evangelical who saw Heaven as a paradigmatic American university.” Sounds like Saunders to me.
There is only one way a novel, or any work of art, can be considered as moral or immoral: does it honestly pursue its inchoate vision? Is it perhaps both moral and immoral? Memory and imagination are the engines of creation. They are fundamental to human consciousness. They shape morality, not the other way around. It doesn’t matter if Saunders’s novel is good, entertaining, witty. It may well be. But it is also tainted by its association with morality police. “Morality” is a cheap and secretly destructive means of political repression. Beyond common decency and the Golden Rule, “morality” changes at the whim of the mob. Or whenever a grifter sees an angle.