The reputation of George Saunders ascended rapidly in the late 1990s only to hang suspended, in anticipation of some development, since his acclaimed collection of stories, “Pastoralia,” appeared in 2000. His promise is timely: More than any other writer, he has developed a style to embody our faddish, politically correct times.

In “Pastoralia” and 1997’s “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” his signature stories take place in an artificial setting, usually a historical theme park where all culture has been reduced to costume, and are acted out by wage slaves bossed by cynical men who insist on accuracy, as connected to profits, but not authenticity. Petty mischief by a third party incites discord between boss and employee, whose critique of the situation is usually short-circuited by his compassion for some pitiful dependent.

“The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil,” Mr. Saunders’s first standalone work, concerns Inner Horner, a tiny nation surrounded by Outer Horner, like Lesotho by South Africa. Phil, a disaffected loser, manipulates the less intelligent Outers into persecuting the Inners, and Phil thereby gains political power.

Leaving behind the slacker aesthetic of his more worldly fiction, Mr. Saunders takes evident joy in creating the ragtag muppets in “Phil.” Old Gus, the oldest Inner Hornerite, “was so old and tired he was shaped something like the letter ‘C,’ if the letter ‘C’ was bald and had two gray withered antlers.”

As in most dystopias, cliche corrupts free will in Mr. Saunders’s fiction: His characters exist in a sugary world of impulse and shallow desire; they are tragically innocent, as this passage from “Phil” demonstrates:

[Phil] was captivated by her glossy black filaments and transparent oscillating membranes, the delicate curve of her exposed spine, her habit of demurely scratching one bearing with a furry glove like appendage, and spent many hours casually circling Inner Horner, hoping to catch her eye, inflating and deflating his central bladder in order to look more manly and attractive.

These cartoony cyborgs, ignorant of their strangeness, behave like kitschy woodland creatures. Kitsch, carefully defined, is a combination of prudence and prurience, as seen in the plump and useless curves of a garden troll or a Kewpie doll. It is an endless feedback loop of shallow desire. Mr. Saunders’s fiction is critical of kitsch, but the more he repeats himself the more he seems to profit by the low-level, sexual buzz of his grotesque creations.

“Phil” immediately recalls “Animal Farm,” but where Orwell’s animals had motivations directly analogous to those of parties relating to Stalin, Mr. Saunders’s characters are personal. Phil is simply selfish and evil, the oppressed Inners simply love each other, and their liberators, the Greater Kellerites, explicitly refer to a “National Enjoyment Level” when making all decisions. The political content of “Phil” is generic.

In this regard, Mr. Saunders is similar to Mark Twain, with whom he has been compared. Twain’s satires were about wit; they pitted an intelligent writer against a foolish society, the writer blinding himself to extenuating circumstances as convenient. But where Twain kept his verbal dignity, Mr. Saunders prefers a patois of borrowed cliche:

‘You people,’ Phil shouted in the stentorian voice, ‘via shiftlessness and inertia, have forced us, a normally gentle constituency, into the position of extracting water from the recalcitrant stone of your stubbonness … But shoulder that musket we must, that musket of subduing you, and this we will …’

Too much of this goes a long way, as Phil might say. It is important to expect great things from writers like Mr. Saunders, but “Phil,” like his children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” only marks time. It would be interesting, for example, to see Mr. Saunders extend his prodigious imagining of nonsense contraptions into deeper waters, as Lewis Carroll did. In spite of his satire, Mr. Saunders demonstrates a real aesthetic yearning for the hypertrophied detritus of our times, and it would be wonderful to see him bring this detritus to fuller life.

blytal@nysun.com