In his fourth collection of stories, Tenth of December, Saunders performs the most rigorous of his cultural biopsies, examining with unsqueamish fidelity the tangled hopes and fears of our great midsection - suburban fathers and mothers, nine-to-fivers, minimum wagers, a soldier, a prisoner, a rapist - and providing a prognosis of the “no guilt” capitalism that has apparently already (pretty much) won. And anybody who doesn’t like that is whining.” Whereas the one I like is the sort of Emersonian/Whitmanesque form which says there’s no point in any of this democracy and capitalism if we’re not simply making more citizens, making brighter citizens, making the lives of the least among us better. And it seems to me that just in my lifetime it’s kind of been decided that the form of capitalism we’re going to embrace is the one that says “if you got it, you deserve it. I think we’re in an interesting time in that maybe capitalism is trying to decide which capitalism it’s going to be. It’s just an overwhelming victory for capitalism.” Yet Saunders, with his judicious brand of optimism, offered that we might still resuscitate a choice: IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with Michael Silverblatt of Bookworm, George Saunders announced the triumph of capitalism: “In our time, I think, capitalism has just won.
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