Short story: "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror"

look i have opinions

Nov 3

"Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror," by George Saunders

First appeared in Quarterly West, No. 34, Winter-Spring 1992 (before Saunders's career had gotten off the ground); collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

A few thousand words?

Saunders usually saves his flights of fancy for the body of the story and not the title, so this is unusual. I feel like it works okay. I could take it or leave it.

Also slightly unusual, at least in these early stories, is the female narrator. I read her as male/no particular gender at first, so I could have used a hint beyond just the name in the title. Funny how important gender can be to our conception of a character.

What a bleak damn ending. At least the hapless antihero of (bunch of spoilers for other Saunders fictions follow) CivilWarLand learned something through death, and that of "Isabelle" found meaning (= love) in his life, and that of "The 400-Pound CEO" holds out hope and clings to dignity in his prison cell.

I feel like Saunders wrote the CivilWarLand stories mainly in order to imagine working a worse job than the one he had at the time. This is not to diminish his brilliance. Art springs from all kinds of low motives! There's nothing like making your characters suffer to ease your own suffering.

Writing in The Adroit Journal twenty-five years later, Adam Davis says, "Reading CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in 2021, I was overwhelmed by its hopelessness. The laughs, while still present, were bitter as burnt toast. I hadn't before noticed how awash the stories are with a Catholic sense of suffering—agony, debt, and penance reign supreme[.]" Later in the same essay: "What exactly can we hope for by way of mercy in this world?" What indeed.