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Absurdly Familiar
A Review by Anna Godbersen

Sometimes surreal depictions tell us more about ourselves than real ones. Such is the case with George Saunders' bizarro fictional sideshow, which manages to get at the way we talk and feel now without ever rendering a recognizable scene. His latest effort, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is a political fable of a world unbound from the physical laws of our own, but not so unlike it for all that. The situation is this: The country of Inner Horner is very small, while the country of Outer Horner is very vast, making the Inner Hornerites (a frail, small people who whisper "complicated mathematical proofs to pass the time") vulnerable to the abuses of the Outer Hornerites. Enter Phil, an average sort of Outer Hornerite with a biography similar to many power-abusing types (abandoned by his father, rejected by his Inner Hornerite crush) whose brain occasionally slips off his brain rack. With nationalist zeal and an intelligence slightly greater than that of his compatriots (he "was so vehement, and used so many confusing phrases with so much certainty"), Phil rises to Special Border Activities Coordinator, and then President of Outer Horner. He initiates a brief reign of terror against the Inner Hornerites, as well as his own people, which involves taxes and disassembling, before meeting his own untimely end.

One of the many pleasures of this little book is the sheer physical weirdness of Saunders' characters; take Phil's flirting techniques, which involve, "inflating and deflating his central bladder in order to look more manly and attractive." Saunders also has a perfect ear for political rhetoric, and so we get the National Life Enjoyment Index Score, the Certificate of Total Approval (signed by Phil's cronies), and the Peace Encouraging Enclosure (a jail, of course). Phil is more a send-up of the machinations of power than a direct satire of our country. But when Phil declares "Us being us, do we not, being fully good, have the right to end what, totally bad, threatens us, even in the slightest?" it doesn't sound so unfamiliar, either.

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