Deconstructing Moral Distinctions: A Review of George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation

All around and above us were those towering walls of light, curving across building fronts, embedded in the sidewalks, custom-fitted to light poles: a cartoon lion eating a man in a suit; a rain of gold coins falling into the canoe of a naked rainforest family; a woman in lingerie running a bottle of Pepsi between her breasts; the Merrill Lynch talking fist asking, ‘Are you kicking ass or kissing it?’; a perfect human rear, dancing; a fake flock of geese turning into a field of Bebe logos; a dying grandmother’s room filled with roses by a FedEx man who then holds up a card saying ‘No Charge.’ And standing beneath all that bounty was our little Teddy, tiny and sad, whose grandfather could not even manage to get him into one crummy show.³