false 28749 1594481520 9781594481529 1022 120 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167955857m/28749.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28749.The_Brief_and_Frightening_Reign_of_Phil 8885 George Saunders 9220 1406 2 1 false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Dec 06 12:54:11 -0800 2007 Sat Jun 06 12:53:01 -0700 2009 The Braindead Megaphone, I figured I would like his short stories even better, that being what he's better-known for. Since this book is, essentially, a single short story, I started with this one. I didn't like it. Saunders' language and the world it describes are weird and fascinating -- the characters live in an ambiguously described, maybe-not-quite-spatial world, with vague, alien features -- Phil, for instance, has the problem that "the bolt holding his brain in position on his tremendous sliding rack occasionally fell out, causing his brain to slide rapidly down his rack and smash into the ground. This happened now." A good deal of the humor comes from the narrator's presumption that we understand how the characters' bizarre anatomy works, even as we are completely unable to.

The story itself, unfortunately, doesn't live up to the language -- it's an such an obvious allegory of contemporary politics that it keeps yelling "HEY LOOK AT ME I'M AN ALLEGORY OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS" at you. This is both smug and boring, and caused me to quit halfway through. I'm going to give Saunders' fiction one more shot, but this left me not nearly as impressed as I wanted to be.]]>