In the midst of our own Frightning Reign, which would fain be Briefer, it’s easy to assume George Saunders’ new novel-cum-fable is a direct attack on the President. But literary — and literate — folks aren’t so obvious.

In The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil readers are dropped into Inner Horner, a country so small that only one of it’s seven inhabitants can claim physical residence at a time. The other six are shuttled into the Short Term Residency Zone, which is actually part of Outer Horner, a “vast, unlimited country.” Of course, this arrangement breeds resentment between Inner and Outer Hornerites; the former are hemmed in and envious of their neighbors’ space, while the latter view Inner Horner as a blot on the landscape, ripe for extinction.

If every age gets the leader it deserves, then Phil certainly fits the bill. After a wily power grab, he sets his sights on Inner Horner, stirring up a bandwagon of revulsion against the defenseless seven residents.

Eric Weinberger, in the New York Times Book Review, asserts that Saunders’ book is “a satire that is not only anachronistic but unnecessary, lacking immediacy and urgency.” The proposed anachronism comes from Weinberger’s overreaching claim that Phil=Hitler, and the rest of Phil’s crew are stand-ins for other members of the Nazi elite. Furthermore, Weinberg claims that the power of fable is its relationship to recognizeable and specific events and places, citing Animal Farm as his example. It seems to me that he misses the point entirely ; the strength of fable is its ability to stand as cipher for any time and place by creating a milieu that is entirely fantastical. Maybe The Brothers Grimm or Italo Calvino had political motives for publishing their collections of folktales; that intent is irrelevant today. We read them for their wide-armed embrace of human folly. High school kids don’t need to know what each animal stands for in Orwell’s book to understand the relations between them, or the intent behind the fable.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a book about power in its rawest form, with a cast of characters composed of expanding bladders,exposed spines and, in the case of the title character, a detachable brain. It’s devastating in its simplicity and sympathy.

Entertaining Q&A with the author of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which just happens to be the subject of my next post.

Chigurh is a good name for an antagonist. It seems a more refined, continental version of its entymological homophone. And Cormac McCarthy’s character has, for all his brutal ways, an air of old world refinement about him. He’s commited to cleaning up — or burying; well, ok, mostly burying– the detritus of a drug deal gone wrong. Like the aging Sheriff Bell who is chasing him down, he’s got a job to do. Only Moss, who stumbles upon the satchel of money and can’t resist trying to escape with it, is acting in the spirit of self interest.

McCarthy excels with characters that act pursuant to strict codes of morality. All that black and white provides a dazzling chiaroscuro. On the surface it’s easy to see that Bell is the good guy, Chigurh wears the black hat, and Moss is pinched in the middle by his greed. But this simple story is complicated by McCarthy’s minimalism. There’s a tense surrealism in this cat, mouse and cheese game that moves through a bleak landscape of empty scrub land, motels and aniseptic office buildings.

The terse dialogue, the stark settings, the unrelenting moral codes – it all harkens back to the cliches of old western films. And it can be a little too manly at times; the fetishizing of guns has come under attack in a few reviews and I agree that the gauges, actions, and ammo seem overkill in prose that is otherwise so spare with detail. As a literature undergrad, awash in the conflict between the musty western canon and multi-culturalism and gender studies, it was a badge of honor to be caught with a McCarthy book. Now some of that same mystique has leaked away.But No Country For Old Men is a strong reminder of his particular charms.