The only really bad situation was when Alec Baldwin punched me in the face and broke my nose.

-Alan Zanger, paparazzo, interviewed in Gig

IN BOSTON, at midnight, two things happen. The first is that whatever adequately lit cafés had remained open this far into darkness  close; and  the second is that NPR commences its broadcast of  the BBC's hour-long news show, The World Today. The situation that results is a great deal like high school: I drive around looking for something that might still be open the way I used to drive around looking for a party to which I'd received a somewhat inexact address. The only difference is that instead of listening to my friend Ari Winikoff relate stories about getting high during D-block, I listen to the BBC.

The best thing about the show is their manner of interviewing: The newsreader displays, almost immediately, an undisguised contempt for the corrupt politician or harried UN official on the other end of the line. The questions are cast with a lacerating precision, added to which the occasional, condescending plea for honesty -- "Oh, come now" -- is but intonational frosting. One gets a glimpse at these moments of how the English must have behaved, once, when they ruled the world.

It's difficult to imagine that politicians don't know what's coming when they are told that the BBC is calling, but many of them seem surprised at the aggressive turn the interview invariably takes -- perhaps officials in oppressive regimes can't find help good enough these days to brief them on the foreign media. Their affronted responses, however, seem honest, or at least honestly vicious. UN officials, meanwhile, who are usually Americans, are refreshingly plainspoken, only occasionally venturing a good word for future UN interventions, the present one having gone, they admit, so very badly.

But then officials from the Clinton administration come on the air. They are younger than the UN reps; more aggressive, in their way, than the foreign politicians; more arrogant than African warlords. They are clearly, if not the New Men or even the New Democrats, certainly different, at least, from you and me, and it is as though the questions, hurled to kill, had plunged instead into a vast cottony pillow. The Clintonians share their master's obfuscatory skills, but their evasions have the uncharming pedantry of the learned: They sidestep the interviewer's attacks and proceed to reiterate a sort of party line, gradually, as they continue, losing focus of their point. The sentences never end, they merely trail off, as if someone had cut the marionette strings, one after the other, with which the original argument had directed the words, and it takes a few moments before finally the whole ensemble falls apart.

IN GEORGE SAUNDERS' STORIES, the corrosion of language that the Clintonian sentence represents is zoomed in on and amplified to construct an entire world. Saunders imagines a workplace where language has broken down, with disastrous effects. Not broken down, mind you, in the grand tradition, running from Chekhov through the Tractatus and Eliot's exasperated "It is impossible to say just what I mean!" to Raymond Carver's impoverished "incommunicability," but broken down and tearing apart on its way somewhere. Saunders' chief villains are those whose sentences are so tangled they are barely comprehensible, whose metaphors drift into senselessness, who are not merely reflecting but actively constructing what Saunders has called the "looming stupidity." Thus, in his new collection, Pastoralia, a self-help guru conducting a seminar on defending your desires (as those desires are represented by a nice warm bowl of oatmeal):

Concept Number Two: crap. Don't worry, folks, I don't use actual  crap up here. Only imaginary crap. You'll have to supply the crap, using  your mind. Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time  -- friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids! -- and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'thanks so much!' You say,  'Crap away!' You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?'”

Metaphors are always collapsing (not to say crapping) in Saunders, hilariously, because the people deploying them couldn't care less – finding their words inadequate, they refuse to make them strain for meaning. Articulation itself is frowned upon: In the title story, the narrator's coworker Janet is considered incompetent because, though she is a theme park cavewoman, she refuses to abide by the no-speaking rule: "Janet's speaking English to me more and more," says the nameless narrator, "which is partly why I feel so, you know, crummy." The higher-ups, meanwhile, crouch behind verbally bankrupt memos of the sort one can imagine receiving at the White House. This one arrives to counteract rumored layoffs:

“In summary, we simply ask you to ask yourself, upon hearing a rumor: Does this rumor cast the organization in a negative light? If so, that rumor is false, please disregard. If positive, super, thank you very much for caring so deeply about your organization that you knelt with your ear to the track, and also, please spread the truth far and wide, that is,  get down on all fours and put your own lips to the tracks. Tell your friends. Tell friends who are thinking of buying stock. Do you have friends who are journalists? Put your lips to their tracks.”

The extension of the "ear-to-tracks" metaphor here borders on the absurd, and, since it's being mobilized for false ends (the rumors, after all, are  true), it takes on a sinister quality. Like the self-help guru's aggressively mediocre mantra -- "Now Is the Time for Me to Win!" -- it need not make sense, because it is sponsored by force. In Saunders' world the syntactic muddle arrives, like Stalin's collectivization, from above.