When George Saunders’s second story collection, “Pastoralia,” appeared in 2000, American fiction seemed to be at a crossroads. It was in that year that Dave Eggers published his memoir and released the landmark issue no. 4 of McSweeney’s magazine, which featured Mr. Saunders, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, and other touchstones of hip literature. Thus ensued a grown-up conversation about irony that masked a broader phenomenon: These writers made fiction that struck knowing young readers as relevant, even cool.

In this context, Mr. Saunders’s appeal was huge. He was creating a fresh vision of the future. Not apocalyptic or even Orwellian, his dystopias were the products of the grunge years and the Internet boom. Overcrowded, unrecyclable, endlessly fake and plastic, his stories were written at the pace of cartoons, filled with instantaneous violence and sexuality, and pitiful, bathetic characters. If the point of American fiction was cultural self-diagnosis, then Mr. Saunders was more on task than any other writer.

Six years later, Mr. Saunders appears to be more engaged than ever. Increasingly drawn to American politics, he has applied his wacky eco-satire to the follies of the Bush administration. Last fall he published an allegorical novella, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.” Although it was conceived in response to a friend’s challenge – to write a story about abstract, nonhuman, nonanimal characters – the cartoony contraptions that animate “Phil” come to serve a higher and more tedious purpose: political illustration. Like Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland,” which begins as a mathematical fantasy about a two-dimensional society, the description of a society drifts swiftly into political commentary, and “Phil” closes in on a timely, predictable lesson about political leadership.

More “Animal Farm” than “Civilwarland,””Phil”felt like a misstep.”In Persuasion Nation” (Riverhead, 228 pages, $23.95), Mr. Saunders’s first collection since “Pastoralia,” finds him writing to specific topical controversies. In “The Red Bow,” for example, the uncle of a dog-mauled child begins a movement to pre-empt future attacks – by killing all the dogs in town. Mr. Saunders’s glib, zany violence seems a little too cheap in this political context.

In “Brad Carrigan, American,” he imagines a reality television show in which a bored housewife bluntly explains that her husband’s interests in philanthropy are “a downer”:

‘I guess I just want some fun,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe that’s how I’d put it.’
‘I know,’ Brad had said. ‘I get that now.’
‘I just want to take life as we find it and enjoy its richness,’ Doris had said. ‘I don’t want to waste my life worrying worrying worrying.’
‘I totally agree with you,’ Brad had said.
Then Doris disappeared beneath the covers and took him in her mouth for the third time that night.

This is deadening; its super-saturated rendition of depraved American life, pointed up by the sexual detail, will overwhelm the most sardonic reader’s palate. If satire were sugar, this is artificial sweetener spilled onto the reader’s tongue.

Mr. Saunders’s cartoonish style does better when it is turned in on itself, exploring our culture of simulation rather than putting on skits in the style of “What’s the Matter With Kansas.” For example, “Brad Carrigan, American” ends with a brilliant stroke: Brad, banished from the airwaves for his complicated thoughts,floats in a gray,nontelevised limbo. He encounters Wampum, a horse from a long-forgotten episode:

‘He used to ride me up and down the prairie,’ mumbles Wampum. ‘Digging his bare feet into my side, praising my loyalty.’

Brad knows this is too complicated. He knows that if Wampum insists on thinking in such complicated terms, he will soon devolve into a shapeless blob, and will, if he ever gets another chance, come back as someone other than Wampum.

Both exchanges, Brad-Doris and Brad-Wampum, delineate the moral content of television. But the first exchange overstates the problem – no television is so baldly didactic – whereas the other looks at television from a unique, inside-out perspective. In “Christmas,” the most realistic story in this collection and a compelling, memoirish piece about roofing, a young George Saunders offers a kind of manifesto:

From the roofs, the city looked medieval, beautiful. I wrote poems in my head, poems that fizzled out under the weight of their own bloat: Oh Chicago, giver and taker of life, city of bald men in pool halls, also men of hair, men who have hair, hairy men, etc etc. On the roofs we found weird things: a dead rat, a bike tire, somebody’s dragon-headed pool floatie, all frozen stuff.

The young man aspires to the topdown vision of Carl Sandburg, who apostrophized Chicago as the “Player With Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.” But Mr. Saunders cannot ignore the squalid things at his feet, “the weird things.” Much as he would like to address our nation and its policies, his gift is more down-to-earth, in stories about the implications of our increasingly weird, trashy daily lives.

The best stories in this collection are wholly given over to the foreground – the weird things at our feet – ignoring the political skyline. The title story, though slight, is for example a winning picture of a universe populated by animate candy bars and polar bears from everyday television commercials. Mr. Saunders writes best when he shuns the temptation of top-down political allegory and writes from the viewpoint of the dragon-headed pool floatie.

blytal@nysun.com