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“Fascinating…Darkly
funny, deeply human….Phil is the illustrated tale of
two countries full of strange creatures, and what happens when one
country gets taken over by a warmongering tyrant named Phil.”
“Reminiscent
of vintage Vonnegut with a dash of Dr. Seuss, this tale of an absurdist
border war captures the aggrieved jingoism of Bush’s America
without ever preaching.”
“Many
critics refer to Saunders as a satirist, and though the term is often
used in conjunction with names like Swift and Twain, it can also be
a trap. The world a satirist creates, some charge, is only a prediction
or, at best, a distortion, as though all successful art isn’t
about distorting, or bending, reality. Another word that gets fastened
to Saunders is moralist. These two terms are often intertwined, of
course. At the core of much satire is some kind of prescription. Still,
even if correct, these two labels, the limitations of the first and
the taint of the scold in the second, don’t do justice to Saunders.
His bleak but merciful stories contain a great deal more than satire,
or at least the toothless send-ups that often stand in for satire,
and they are never preachy…The message of The Brief and
Frightening Reign of Phil, delivered with great wit, isn’t
overtly political…But there is no denying the noble rage at
the heart of this book.…Stunning…Brilliant.”
“The
timing and panache of George Saunders’ new novella, a parable
called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, could not
be more appropriate. If we must live in an age where everyone is aggrieved
to some degree or other, the always clever Saunders seems to have
realized that his only comic redoubt is to find comedy in a story
concerning the most offensive things possible: fascism and genocide….Saunders,
whose prose is never stronger than when he adopts the humorous fatalism
of the career dead-ender (see the classic Pastoralia), proves more
than up to the task of giving voice to an entire geopolitical region,
from devious presidential advisers to doubting soldiers, funny-walking
foreign neighbors, and, best of all, a marvelously self-important
and obsequious media, ‘squat little men with detachable megaphones
growing out of their clavicles…The book is a riff—and
a very amusing one, I hasten to add—on any number of 20th century
monstrosities…Madly inventive.”
“In
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Saunders has sketched
a parable about the abuses of power than has an unlikely sting in
its whimsy…its imagery and perverse cruelties linger in the
mind after you’ve read it.”
“The
Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a political fable of a
world unbound from the physical laws of our own, but not so unlike
it for all that….One of the many pleasures of this little book
is the sheer physical weirdness of Saunders’ characters; take
Phil’s flirting techniques, which involve, ‘inflating
and deflating his central bladder in order to look more manly and
attractive.’ Saunders also has a perfect ear for political rhetoric,
and so we get the National Life Enjoyment Index Score, the Certificate
of Total Approval (signed by Phil’s cronies), and the Peace
Encouraging Enclosure (a jail, of course.) Phil is more than a send-up
of the machinations of power than a direct satire of our country…but
it doesn’t feel so unfamiliar, either.
“A
comedic sci-fi tale about a one-person country whose outer borders
are controlled by an all-powerful jackass named Phil. Yes, it's another
Bush-bashing book, but Saunders is too smart to deliver anything like
what you'd expect.
“Like
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Saunders finds a backdoor
into our conscience through surrealism, albeit of a more ironic stripe.
Characters get kitschy names like Vance and Freeda, and non-humanoid
features—one ‘man’ is a tunafish can with a blue
dot on it- and yet this draws out their essential human features.
When Phil proposes to disassemble a harmless old Inner Hornerite named
Cal ‘in the interest of preventing further violence,’
an essential line is crossed. So many real-world events can be seen
here, but the genius of this book however is not its applicability,
but rather how it convinces us to care for a beleaguered people—without
allowing us the cozy certitude that they are us.”
“Extraordinary...Saunders'
fable of imperialism and exceptionalism is some parts Orwellian caustic
vision, some parts shaded Dr. Seuss whimsy, some parts Pynchonian
satire but mostly Saunders' own original, bemused take on the world
as he finds it.”
“Saunders’
first two works of fiction, Pastoralia and CivilWarland
in Bad Decline, both consisted of stories, many of which appeared
in the New Yorker, noted for stylistic hijinks and visionary
grace. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a departure
of sorts, or an evolution: wackier still, and less grounded in reality.
It suggests an obvious question: Yes, it's funny, but is it literature?
Like judges we might search for signs of precedent, and there are
many: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that 18th-century
darling of the postmoderns, has a similar antic style and imagination,
a mixture of high intelligence and comic bathos. Saunders’ fiction
also resembles the best of Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme and Mark
Leyner. It's daring and different. It laughs at the absurdity of imagination
itself, which is what our own world needs most when things look bleak.”
“Saunders’
story collections (Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad
Decline) were praised for their ‘wicked’ humor, earning
comparisons to the absurdist satire of Vonnegut, Pynchon and Beckett….The
Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is arguably Saunders’
most surreal work yet…but also his most sympathetic. Even if
the most identifiably ‘human’ of his characters has a
tuna fish can for a head and a blue dot for a heart, when that ‘sad
blue dot’ expands and contracts all night long, ‘as if
hyperventilating, or sobbing,’ it works.”
“Although
the war in Iraq is quickly brought to mind, the novella's message
is a broad and timeless one about conflict and human nature... The
book's moral center, however, is anything but simplistic: to what
lengths will an individual go to be told that he or she is appreciated?...
Although Saunders’ work is easily labeled satire or science
fiction, his real gifts are literary ones. No matter how masked by
experimentation, Saunders has a soaring command of language that he
uses for the most important element of fiction: building character....
His words move quickly from mundane to futuristic to poignant to sarcastic....
Saunders' dialogue, in particular, makes for easy and humorous reading
while grounding scenes in everyday emotion.”
“A
scary fable for our dark, unwittingly absurd times.”
“George
Saunders’ daring satire is…often witty, if ultimately
unsettling… Like Animal Farm, which used talking animals
as a vehicle for scathing social commentary, …Phil uses nonhuman
characters….But the fantastical nature of Saunders’ creatures
doesn’t dilute his depiction of dehumanization…The humorous
touches, and his detailed descriptions of his bizarre creations, ensure
that despite its heavy message, Phil never feels like required-reading
burden.”
“With
an absurdist wit as playful as Monty Python’s and a vision as
dark as Samuel Beckett’s, a postmodernist spins a provocative
parable of political power and its abuses…A mind-bending work.”
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