Saunders in the great wasteland

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If you missed George Saunders on ‘The Late Show With David Letterman’ yesterday night, drop what you’re doing and check out the video of his appearance.

Saunders was a nearly perfect talk show guest: funny, self-deprecating and full of terrific stories, including the saga of his own downward employment spiral, which ended with him working in a slaughterhouse, an experience he details with perverse glee.

It’s hardly surprising that Saunders should be so engaging; anyone who’s read his fiction (‘Pastoralia,’ ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,’ ‘In Persuasion Nation’) can tell you that. What’s astonishing is that someone in Letterman’s office recognized this and even more, that Saunders made it onto the show.

Although literary authors used to be a staple of the talk show circuit--Jack Kerouac on William F. Buckley’s ‘Firing Line,’ Norman Mailer duking it out with Gore Vidal on Dick Cavett, and Truman Capote on ‘The Tonight Show’--those days are long gone. But watching Saunders, you have to wonder why that is, since he made for far more entertaining television than, say, Jessica Alba, with whom he shared the bill.

Of course, there’s an irony to all this, because Saunders made his network television debut not for his groundbreaking and often brilliant fiction, but in support of a collection of occasional magazine pieces, ‘The Braindead Megaphone’ (Riverhead: 258 pp., $14 paper). Last week, Ben Ehrenreich critiqued the book in our pages, calling it ‘a grab bag’ in which Saunders ‘loses his grip on what’s at stake.’ It’s a book for acolytes, in other words, rather than one that will attract new readers. Yet in a media landscape where books and authors are often little more than an afterthought, I guess we have to take what we can get.

David L. Ulin