George Saunders’s Reluctant Morality Tale

Don DeLillo once remarked, with regard to twentieth-century American fiction, that it is “as though Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next.” What he meant was a turn from fiction that was rooted in reality—in the granularly obsessive depiction of the real—to fiction that was about “systems.” In the work of Pynchon and his progeny, one needn’t concern oneself much with the authentic reality of Tyrone Slothrop or Mucho Maas, and should instead understand these wraith-like figments as an extension of the power structure.