Most of this book is very smart, witty, funny, and relevant. Its all fine until (spoiler) the end in which God shows up and ‘saves’ everyone… assuming salvation of your nation means the extermination of your entire population combined with the horror of forming new people by recycling the corpses of your nation’s former occupants.

The message I got from this is that we as a nation, or even as individuals, are incapable of solving social problems on our own, and as such we need God to solve them for us. Also that our problems are even beyond that of God, and the only real solution is to kill all of us and wipe the slate clean. Using our corpses for spare parts.

This is a great book. Mr Saunders describes a world in bits where semi-detached creatures wander the American landscape encountering pain, death and each other. Disembodied, bitter, and driven only by the latest needs implanted into their psyches by advertising, marketing and coporate culture, Mr Saunders describes the world we live in and the frightening consequences of (post) modernity.

After all, there’s a moron in the Whitehouse, Nuclear God is stalking us in the West and Middle East, while Fox News reminds us that the real story is Brangelina’s designer kiddie hit list. The real insanity is outside the pages of the book…

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (which is a collection of stories) is both hilarious and disturbing, and well worth thumbing through if surreal American Lit. is your thang.

Like Orwell’s Animal Farm, Saunders examines the current political systemin the US (although he denies it). Unlike Orwell, and fittingly to the inane political environment, the actors in this story are not even as recognizable as farm animals – instead they are bizarre assmeblages of random details which act according to equally bizarre rules – yet recognizable to anyone living through the present regime.