‘No time for US writers to be trivial’, says George Saunders

George Saunders is a funny writer who is seriously worried his Donald Trump-led nation is in crisis.

Author George Saunders in New Zealand for the Auckland Writers Festival, before coming to Australia. Picture: Nigel Marpel

George Saunders is a funny writer. His sharp take on a near-­future America in short fiction collections such as CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December have a ring of prescience today.

But Saunders, 58, a Buddhist, a husband, a father of two adult daughters, is less inclined to joke now because he’s worried his Donald Trump-led nation is in crisis.

The New York writer is glad to be in Australia for the first time, for this week’s Sydney Writers Festival, and not only to see the harbour he was told is beautiful.

“At this political moment it’s good to be out of the US and to take stock. It’s an agitated universe at home and to see countries such as Australia, with which we have such a strong bond, not as politically divided is ­refreshing.’’

That almost sounds like a joke, given Australia’s revolving-door leadership in the past decade, but Saunders is serious. He believes writers and other artists must assert themselves.

“In my lifetime artists have consented to a reduction in their status, in a time of rampant materialism and literalism. We have taken a back seat: art is nice but it’s not essential.

“My view since the election is that’s wrong. The blunting of the national intelligence is due to the low regard with which we hold education and the arts.

“It’s even more important today that we say art is the highest way in which we think.’’

Saunders will consider the responsibility of the writer in a panel discussion at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre tonight. He will deliver an opening night address at the SWF tomorrow night.

He will no doubt be asked about Mr Trump, whom Saunders noted, in a recent piece for The New Yorker, looked like Alan Hale, who played Skipper in the ’60s TV series Gilligan’s Island.

But the president he will want to defer to is Abraham Lincoln, who is at the heart of his new novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’ first novel after six acclaimed short story collections centres on Lincoln in 1862 in a Georgetown cemetery, grieving for his 11-year-old son Willie.

The story is told by other dead people who, like Willie, are still in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the purgatorial place between death and whatever comes afterwards.

So why is Lincoln relevant today? “He was someone who understood leadership is not disconnected from spiritual and philosophical life. He was growing in that way until his death,’’ Saunders says. “For him leading was a form of thinking.’’

Saunders finds some cause for some optimism: his daughters, in their mid 20s, are now switched on to politics. “Assuming we survive what’s happening today, their generation will never take democracy for granted again.”