"I'll tell you something else about which I've been lately thinking!" he bellowed in a suddenly stentorian voice. "I've been thinking about our beautiful country! Who gave it to us? I've been thinking about how God the Almighty gave us this beautiful sprawling land as a reward for how wonderful we are. We're big, we're energetic, we're generous, which is reflected in all our myths, which are so very populated with large high-energy folks who give away all they have! If we have a National Virtue, it is that we are generous, if we have a National Defect, it is that we are too generous! Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a crappy land? I think not! God Almighty gave them that small crappy land for reasons of His own. It is not my place to start cross-examining God Almighty, asking why He gave them such a small crappy land, my place is to simply enjoy and protect the big bountiful land God Almighty gave us!"

From somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Animal Farm comes George Saunders's new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a biting satire of the selfishness, insularity, and outright stupidity that has so characterized the Bush Era in American life.

Saunders fans may feel a little let down by the book, which simply isn't as finely crafted as CivilWarLand or Pastoralia. But this book is after different things. This is polemic terrority; the allegory is not so much thinly veiled as completely naked. And as a polemic, the story mostly works. Bush receives the brunt of Saunders's wrath, although the media and a too easily manipulated American populace are also brutally (but rightly) satirized.

Like everything else Saunders writes, it's hilarious, insightful, and absolutely worth reading.

The only real problem with Phil is the same one that plagued the end of the otherwise excellent Saunders story, "ComCom," in a recent New Yorker. Saunders's recent stories seem to rely increasingly on magical thinking for their outs. Having exposed the gluttony and sloth that lurks beneath the smooth plastic of contemporary society, Saunders seems unable to envision any way out for us, offers no hope for the world or its benighted inhabitants save for divine intervention. He may view this as a legitimate hope. But for me, the notion that only God can save us now is, if anything, more depressing than the satire itself. Because the cold fact is that no one is coming to save us, no one to rescue us, no one to dismantle our Phils for us and enlighten us suddenly into a kinder, gentler, better world.

If the gift of grace is our only hope, we have no hope. There's no one to save us but us, and we're running out of time, and Phil is at the wheel.