Liberation Day and the Prisons We Create

George Saunders's recent short story book is an exploration of “the slowly boiled frog”

Image from The Sydney Morning Herald

This book is a rollercoaster ride straight to hell, a rickety drop through a nightmare factory of the prisons we create for ourselves. Performers in a theme park withstand dystopian degradations. A grandfather grapples with the regret of inaction in an epistolary piece to his grandson. A mother sits at a moral crossroads after practicing a life of benevolence. The time she spent “deciding if some plastic tofu tub was recyclable” or “hit[ting] a squirrel and circl[ing] back to see if she could rush it to the vet.” Do a million good acts outweigh one of sin? In Liberation Day, George Saunders reminds us that in the prison of the self, “you are trapped in you.”

But these characters don’t seem trapped in themselves. Not really. They’re creators: writers, reenactors, performers operating in the economic, political, and social landscapes they’ve acclimatized to. The rollercoaster ride we’re boarded onto is a lazy river for them, floating into authoritarian societies with little discomfort. As Anne Enright metaphorizes it in her review for The Guardian, “the slowly boiled frog.”

There’s little resistance, a direct contrast to the title, these characters are submissive in their…