I was gaining weight, losing energy, had grown a consolation ponytail, would go home sore in my ankles and knees from walking what felt like miles on the thin carpeting that ran over our concrete floors. I spent a lot of time at the photocopier, producing copies of the reports I had just edited, so we could send them to Kodak or the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who, we suspected, often filed them without having read them. I was good at taping figures into place on frame sheets. I had earned a reputation as the go-to guy where document covers were concerned. I had an engineering degree but was working as a tech writer. It was being plundered of its sensuality every day. “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” wrote Terry Eagleton, and that was certainly true of my body at that time. We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived. I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 19, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story.

By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders’s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. We loved Joel Lovell’s profile of George Saunders in yesterday’s Times Magazine.

Civilwarland in bad decline review