But the stakes get raised: The prison’s minders decide a better proof-of-concept would be to dose the women anyway, then record Jeff’s reaction. Small wonder the story didn’t work out as a novel, as Saunders told the New Yorker. (“I had written many, many pages of a draft in which Jeff escaped, and it became a story about him hiding down in the town. But it didn’t really have much life in it.”) In imagining a environment where authority figures are concerned about “underloving or overloving,” Saunders has written a cousin to stories like “Harrison Bergeron”, in which the urge to keep a society even-keeled leads to all manner of cruelty and oppression. But Saunders has at least two new tricks up his sleeve.
