Liberation Day by George Saunders

One reviewer characterized this as a collection of absurdly funny short stories populated by characters who are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, where the author investigates the prisons that we insist on making for ourselves. I could not have come close to saying it better or more succinctly myself. The characters are happy in their difficulty, at least at first. These joke prisons in order to remind the reader of the various prisons – economic, psychological and spiritual – which we build for ourselves. The first and last is the prison of the self: the take home message seems to be that you are trapped within yourself, which is the ultimate prison from which there is no escape. And even more sadly, there lurks underneath the irony a nostalgia for American optimism, and this includes a nostalgia for half-decent capitalism, something I am not sure ever existed, but exists less so now. It is a strange mix of patriotism and pessimism, with the tongue in cheek humor to top it off. Much like his last book, Lincoln In The Bardo, I am not sure how much of it I get and how much I miss, but my guess is a lot of the later.