Sketches in Black: 17 Darkly Humorous, Hilarious Stories

Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde (Paris), 11 August 1994

If you are scathing, if parvenus, have-you-seen-me’s and other nouveaux riches ruin the scenery for you, if you’re a snob (really), a cynical nothing, you are the ideal summer reader of the 17 stories John Saul has brought together in one book and called Some Good Americans.

While writing an important essay, Voltaire’s Bastards, 656 pages on the dictatorship of reason in the West, John Saul, to relax, wrote these sketches, which are sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes hilarious, sometimes calmly cynical. Sketches which are stiffly humorous and often very black. We run into, among others, a rich, old woman disdainful of the waiters but whose antecedents aren’t that far from those of the waiters; a woman from Denver whose son is poisoned with the cake she is preparing for her husband; a man who dies from following the strict food diet of his wife; a slightly inane princess who marries a too fat nightclub owner; as well as the many dictators the narrator meets, unexpectedly or almost, in his world travels.

And let us talk about the narrator: even though he maintains (in “the narrator takes time to reflect”) that he has settled up with the imbecile reader who wants to confuse him with the author, this refined character, traipsing around the world with a slightly haughty curiosity, is not without things in common with John Saul himself. Here are two men who are both observers, lucid, pitiless of too polished exteriors, too civilized for the end of a century where vulgarity parades around with the indecency of contentment. Two men, or the same man, it doesn’t matter, to compose these 17 texts which make one story, a delightful novel, invigoratingly wicked.