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This originally appeared in The Declaration on 2 February 2006.

Some animals are more equal than others: At first blush, one might think George Saunders’ new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is just a political allegory for early twenty-first century America. There’s the vaguely fascistic despot, Phil, who (a) speaks best when his brain is removed from his head, (b) responds to violence with greater violence, (c) takes the presidency of his country by undemocratic means, (d) enforces loyalty oaths on his constituents and (e) steals every last resource of a bordering nation. There’s the populace who follow his every decree enthusiastically, eating up the drivel he spouts about their great nation. And there’s the “media”—three guys with bullhorns—who try desperately to report on all these actions, but instead have a case of ADHD and like to talk out their anuses. Sound like any country you know?

Like that other political allegory against totalitarianism that you might have read back in high school, Saunders uses simple language and distinctly inhuman characters to get his point across. Where Orwell used animals to obvious effect (the animals most in favor of the socialization of the farm are, ahem, the sheep), Saunders characters don’t even seem alive. One Inner Hornerite consists of a tuna can, a belt buckle, a blue dot and some connecting parts; another resembles a bald letter C with antlers and side vents to breathe. The Outer Hornerites are as odd, with a presidential advisor who is just a mirror with shady eyes.

The plot is just as insistently abstract. Inner Horner is completely surrounded by the nation of Outer Horner, and it’s only big enough to hold one of it’s citizens at a time. The other citizens wait outside, in an area termed the “Short Term Residency Zone.” When Inner Horner shrinks, stranding the occupying citizen in Outer Horner, all hell breaks loose. The Outer Hornerites tax the Inner Hornerites within an inch of their lives, there’s a coup, and everything the Inner Hornerites do is suddenly interpreted as an attack.

Considering how weird all of this is, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is probably Saunders’ most immediately accessible work. The language is simple and the characters seem to have a fairly one-to-one relationship to reality. There are no ghosts, no children with memory implants that speak in a denatured English—just what appears to be a simplistic allegory about the state of democracy in America today. There’s nothing as seriously challenging as the stories in Pastoralia or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The entire book can be read in about forty-five minutes, and re-read faster if you’re on deadline.

But as the story continues, it starts to resist these easy comparisons. Saunders writes conclusions to his stories that do more than simply resolve the plot, happy ending or not. He often includes a twist at the end—not a “Finally I can sit and read all of these books oh no my glasses broke!” type of twist, but a more subtle one that forces the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about what has come before. Slowly, the one-to-one correspondence between Phil and that guy about ninety miles from here falls apart. Another nation, Greater Keller, is introduced: Greater Keller launches an attack to force regime change in Outer Horner; they measure their national wealth through a statistic called the National Life Enjoyment Index Score. Sound like any country you know?

Unfortunately, if you’re reading for the politics, this will probably be a case of too little, too late. By this point, we’re already two-thirds of the way through the book. Saunders’ blurring of the lines doesn’t really add anything to a reader?s understanding of the characters, who remain mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, since an even bigger deus ex machina is soon in coming. What it does do is change the point of the allegory considerably: The book’s not against totalitarianism (well, yeah, okay, it is), it’s not against communism or capitalism or anything so crass. It’s an argument against partisan violence that?s as true in this country as any other. Every satirist is an idealist at heart, after all.

There’s a problem with all of this, however. It’s that reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as allegory is so reductive that it erases everything someone should be reading fiction for. The allegory’s just there to enhance the humor, really: when one realizes that the media folk have a mouth by their ass, it’s so over-the-top that one can’t help but laugh. When Phil wins over the Outer Hornerites by a “stentorian” speech after his brain falls out, the chuckle that follows is just as involuntary. The novella contains a comic universe that’s only funnier because of its odd intersections with reality. (Which is really the definition of satire, after all.)

It helps that Saunders is able to free his prose from the constraints of reality, too; there’s nothing to keep the words on the page, and it flows from laughter to anger to just pretty in a matter of a few sentences. On an uninhabited part of Outer Horner, he writes that it was “a lush verdant zone where cows’ heads grew out of the earth shouting sarcastic things at anyone who passed, which, though lush and verdant, was unpopulated because the cows’ sarcasm was so withering.” There are illustrations, too—always a little odd in an “adult” work of fiction—by Benjamin Gibson, but they suit the story quite well. They help the reader imagine the very odd characters that Saunders envisions, and at the same time have an odd beauty all to themselves.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a sharp little book—a quick read that won’t change your mind on any of those pressing political issues that divide the nation, but it will keep you chuckling as you go along. It’s not Animal Farm (and thank God for that). It’s a satire that keeps stretching at the boundaries of what satire can do, far more than a condemnation of Bush or Hitler or totalitarianism. Because even if all allegories were equal, some would still be more equal than others.

So here’s the thing about Chuck Klosterman’s new book: he’s stolen almost every idea I had for when I published my first in two, three, or ten years. Romantic love as a Hollywood concept? Yeah, I’d thought of that. The importance of Saved by the Bell to a certain generation of young people? Yeah, I’d gotten that too. The NBA as the only sport that matters? Check. Presenting the table of contents as a CD track listing? That was my ace in the hole.

What I’m getting at is that I should be pissed off, or offended, or something, since I’ve now been beaten to the punch on just about everything I had to contribute to popular culture. Surprisingly, though, I’m not. Because Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is not only better written than I could manage at this point, it’s also probably more insightful than I ever get. And, oh yeah, he’s an editor at Spin and I run a tiny-ass mezine.

So here’s a quick briefing on what “cultural criticism” is: it’s a way for guys who are too obsessed with Pop Culture (capitals are necessary) and know it to turn things around, rationalize their behavior. It’s okay that Klosterman has watched nearly every episode of The Real World three times, identifying with the protagonists like close friends, because he’s smart enough to realize that this is dumb. He’s also smart enough to argue that everyone’s been affected by the quintessential reality program to some degree (at least, those of us of a certain age), resulting in a lot of people who are, for all purposes, one-dimensional. You’ve got your guys who are party animals, the folks who are quiet intellectuals, the folks who are screamingly ignorant, and your Pucks. He points out that as the producers realized that boiling down the roommates to their defining characteristic equaled drama, the MTV-watching populace did essentially the same thing.

And so it goes for a wide range of topics: why soccer is a loser sport (it’s for those kids who aren’t good at anything else, because you can’t be bad at soccer); how the “downer ending” of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Non-Special Edition led to slacker culture and a stoned Winona Ryder singing “My Sharona” in a gas station; how children’s cereal ads lay the groundwork for hipsters and other elite groups in college and beyond; the strange, Rapture-oriented world of Evangelical Christians.

There is a problem with this approach, though, and that’s that it tends to solipsism, a definition of which is handily included among the epigrams at the start of the book. Almost all of these essays are directly from Chuck’s mind; there are not a lot of external sources that he quotes other than his friends and associates (though there are many hilarious footnotes regardless). The best essay in the book is, hands down, “Appetite for Replication,” in which he goes on a road trip with a Guns & Roses cover band called Paradise City; he gets a lot out of the descriptions of the band members, how they react to others on their tour. It’s not surprising that this is one of the two essays that appeared in magazines first. Everything else is new to this book, and it suffers somewhat because of this.

Even then, he stumbles on some cultural news that’s pretty revealing. In an essay about The Sims, that game where we try to remake our lives as much as possible on a computer, he writes this about his seven-year-old cousin, Katie, as she tells him to ignore the backstory of his Sim:

“It was uncharacteristic for Kate to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. . . . [But] in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception.”

It’s a pretty damning account of the effect computers have on kids imaginations, and it’s no less powerful because Klosterman stuck with someone he knew pretty intimately to write about.

But I guess the beef I’m getting at is that the book never really comes together as an argument. It’s great that he details all these things about how we are and how we behave in such a highly connected, corporate driven world (though he does, strangely, omit chat rooms and instant messaging and the web except for a brief chapter on porn–at last, something original to contribute!). He says at the beginning that everything is connected, even if nothing matters on it’s own. But the problem is that he doesn’t really write about these connections. He doesn’t talk about how The Sims is connected to internet voyeurism, or how the characters can emerge as one-dimensional as the characters on The Real World (and how can you miss that, when half the Sims Family Album pages are wanna-be Kristof’s directing The Real World LCXI: Bobby’s Computer?). He doesn’t draw parallels between Saved by the Bell and the cereal commercials, even though they were presumably shown in between one another. If you’re going to have an essay titled “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” and have it be about baseball and soccer, don’t you at least owe it to yourself to reference how Nick Hornby added to the previously mentioned John Cusack Experience mentioned in the first essay, “This Is Emo”? Klosterman has all the pieces there, but he never really puts them together. Maybe that’s what he intended, though. I’m sure that he’d say this is exactly what our lives are like today.

Originally appeared in The Dec. I don’t remember when, and I can’t look it up because I made such a crappy webmaster.

Neal Pollack is the greatest American writer to have ever lived. He has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other literary organizations that begin with “The New.” He has written over forty books, won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award (three times!), and has been twice selected as a member of Oprah’s Book Club. He is fluent in Spanish, was close friends with John McCain, and has posed undercover as a transgendered teenager to get the scoop. He is elegant, dashing, charming and, above all else, handsome. He has slept with over 500 women. Wait. You’ve never heard of him? What do you mean? Are you culturally ignorant? Stupid? A pitiful excuse for a human being?

Actually, you probably just don’t read McSweeney’s, the upstart literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Might Magazine fame (and whether or not this makes you culturally ignorant is a discussion for another day). Pollack, a columnist for the Chicago Reader, has been writing extensively for both the print version and the online journal (www.mcsweeneys.net) of McSweeney’s for the past year. He has been writing so extensively, in fact, that many reviewers believed him to be Eggers himself, a situation that slightly angered Pollack, Eggers, and Pollack’s mother, to say the least.

Pollack has now completed a compendium of his work, except that it isn’t much of a compendium at all. The book is, instead, almost completely original, though some of his pieces for McSweeney’s, such as “Europe: the Forgotten Continent,” are mentioned as his literary works of genius. The basic notion behind the Anthology is that, in addition to being a great novelist, etc, Pollack has also written great pieces of journalism, which he is now, finally, sharing with a deserving public in one essential volume.

His writing style is, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to describe. For the most part, Pollack takes freelance writing’s bloated sense of ego to the extreme. To picture this, take your favorite Dec article, and imagine how it would have sounded if the author was twenty times more egotistical than he or she really is (in the event you chose Mark Grabowski as your base, make it just five times more self-important). Then retitle it with something along the lines of, “The Albania of My Existence,” “Introduction to the New Slavery,” or “An Interview with My Sister, Who Is a Lesbian.”

For example, in “I Am Friends with a Working Class Black Woman,” Pollack’s analysis of life in the South Bronx, he writes, “Then I realized: I was friends with this woman, this Cora Johnson, this subject of mine. I’d had black friends before