This is the second volume of Saunders' fiction that I've read, after CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Saunders is a good writer, but not a great one, with a tendency to be incredibly unsubtle. He has some points to make about the state of America today, and sometimes he sacrifices the story for the moral. And he does this in such a way that, after a couple of bad stories, you feel like someone is screaming "IGNORANCE! COMMERCIALISM! VIOLENCE! SELF-ABSORPTION!" at you over and over and over. And those are the stories I disliked. But then Saunders drops his message and actually focuses on the story and the characters and the emotion, and then he's actually quite good. I would say that 5 of the 12 stories in In Persuasion Nation are definitely worth reading, but the rest range from mediocre to almost offensively blatant. ( )

Maybe the fact that I had already read three or four of Saunders' other books made the magic wear off. Yes, I know he has characters in crazy situations who help to explore some philosophical views. Yes, I know he mixes reality with an outrageous fantasy...but this time, it didn't do much for me. ( )

Saunders crafts an absurd, but familiar, world—a Baudrillarian carceral-state / resort nation of ubiquitous, coercive advertising inhabited by emotionally atrophied, linguistically impoverished narrators who feel the possibility of some other kind of life, like a dull tooth ache, at the periphery of their hyper-mediated experience. It sounds grim, but is actually very funny. ( )

Saunders' stories are bizarre, sad, and terribly, terribly funny. He nails the absurd, comically nightmarish drone of modern mundanity—from the discourse of corporate inspiration, to driver's ed pedagogy, to a range of anxious personal fantasy. These stories make you both grateful that they are not about you, and unsure that that is actually true. ( )

http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/2006/04... ( )