In one passage from “ Bounty,” his brilliant 1995 novella, a slavemaster in a barbaric America of the near future explains to his newly purchased human chattels the nature of their relationship - but in the language of a garrulous, enlightened CEO who’s just returned from a three-day human resources retreat. I can recall the precise moment I went from thinking that George Saunders was a talented writer of funny stories to thinking that he might be a genuine Swiftian force in American fiction, a satirist who so ably captured the risible absurdity of our age that he seemed capable of causing real damage.