When George Saunders began writing “Fox 8”, he imagined it might be for children. The story, published in the Guardian in 2017 and reprinted now as a book, is told from the point of view of a fox who has learned to write, phonetically, by gazing through windows at “yumans” reading to their kids. As one might expect from Saunders, it is very funny. (“Yumans wud go: You kids stop fighting, we’re at the Mawl, kwit it, kwit it, if you don’t stop fiting how wud you like it if we just skip the Mawl and you can get rite to your aljubruh, Kerk?”). As it turned out, it is completely inappropriate for children. “The sweet tone leads you to believe that the author is going to protect the innocent fox, because he made him,” says Saunders. “And then, as is the case in the real word, the most innocent person is just as susceptible to violence as the least.”

It’s the kind of reversal that the 59-year-old excels at, not merely thwarting the reader’s expectations, but yanking the narrative into such sudden, brutal turns that the experience of reading him can be thoroughly disorienting. In his short story collection Tenth of December every story seems to hinge on a more shocking upset than the last, while Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ debut, Booker prize-winning novel of 2017, is in the first instance so weird as to be almost unreadable. With Fox 8, Saunders does something one might, in isolation, think it almost impossible for a book to do, which is to resensitise the reader to violence. “I realised that somehow, especially in film, you’re allowed to root for the violence a little bit, even if it’s supposed to be terrible,” he says. “But this is like: I’m a fox who can’t spell, and I have trauma.”

Fox 8 has learned to write phonetically from by gazing through windows at ‘yumans’ reading to their kids. Illustration: Chelsea Cardinal

The trauma arrives, of course, at the hands of the yumans, who take Fox 8’s trust and stomp it to death with one heel. The story has an environmental portent, and also makes a deep underlying point about kindness, something that Saunders returns to repeatedly; his 2013 commencement speech at Syracuse University – “What I regret most in life are my failures of kindness” – justifiably went viral and still feels like something one should check in with and read once a year.

And we do not live in kind times. The polarised political climate in the US is tricky for someone whose stock in trade is nuance, and for whom political engagement has never been a primary urge. “I read something really interesting that said satire is very difficult when the opposition doesn’t accept Enlightenment values,” says Saunders. “It’s the one question that won’t close for me, quite. It changes, so right now I’m feeling tired of ugliness and sordidness and I want to go back and write fiction. But it’s temporary. You can’t live like that. I’ve got a lot of people in my extended family who are Trump supporters. The easy stance of progressive disdain is not really available to me.”

Nor should it be, surely? “No, it’s way too easy. So many of the things that Trump exploited were liberal ideas. Income inequality, shitty education, the degradation of the middle class. You go out into middle America and the lives there are really sort of ... I don’t know what the word is, but they’re not easy, and they’re not nice. Most of the food sucks. The physical environment is decaying. So I think Bernie Sanders had it, and Trump put on a bit of a racist hat and slipped in front of him, but that doesn’t mean that the original problems aren’t still there. It’s a sad time, I think.”

The irony is that not only does Saunders’ work thrive against dark backgrounds, but he is never more nimble than when writing his way out of a tight corner. “For me,” he says, “the constraints help the beauty to happen; as soon as I say there’s a fox and he can’t spell, I go, ‘Oh yeah; we can do something with that.’ And as a reader, you may go, ‘OK, I don’t know.’ And that’s a perfect relationship – for me to be saying, ‘I think this’ll be fine,’ and for you to be saying, ‘I don’t think it’ll be fun.’”

If a story has charm that’s one model. If it has a bit of oh-you’re-being-a-dick about it then I won you over? That’s more powerful

The tension introduced by setting up, in the first few pages, a premise that may cause the reader anxiety is one of the primary ways in which Saunders achieves his effect, an approach fraught with risk but that, when it works, has the power to blow the reader’s head off. “I talk to my students about this all the time – you are in an attempted intimate conversation with someone and you’re constantly repelling them somehow. And then you’re pulling them back in. I think most of us have the dream of writing the perfect story in which the reader just likes us from the beginning and stays with us. But I don’t think that’s really art. Gregor Samsa [in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis] finds he’s been transformed into a large beetle and part of you goes: ‘Bullshit. No, Franz.’ But another part of you goes: ‘Well, all right.’ You have faith. That’s the exciting thing.”

It is, he says, a question of resisting the urge towards easy charm. I remember being quite angry at the start of Lincoln in the Bardo – Saunders’ wild account of a purgatorial realm inhabited by Abraham Lincoln’s young son after his death, which opens with a set of short paragraphs so baffling they seem to upend the transaction between writer and reader. “That’s right. If a story has immediate charm and continues to, that’s one model. If a story has a little bit of oh-you’re-being-a-dick about it – that’s a technical term – and then I won you over? That’s a more powerful relationship. Just like in a real relationship.”

As an approach, this only works in fiction and, over the last few years, Saunders has been tempted into reportage, notably his long piece for the New Yorker in 2016 in which he attended a series of Trump rallies. He found it a tough story, artistically and psychologically, and spent a large portion of the piece struggling with the ethics of how far to go in terms of empathising with Trump’s base. “I have so much complicated allegiance. When I first started writing, I was coming from the midwest and I always felt a bit below the other writers I knew, who were Ivy League people, and I had a real feeling that what I had to say was about working-class people. And it turned out that I was right. I sometimes feel around progressives, you’re not being nuanced, you’re not being kind. And then you go back to the midwest and see that they’re not being nuanced about us, either.”

In terms of Trump, what depressed Saunders most was the disconnect between the humanity shown by his supporters in individual circumstances, and the way in which this failed to challenge their allegiance to Trump. In trying to understand this, he found Gregor von Rezzori’s 1969 novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, very useful. “He’s an antisemite in Germany before the war, and mostly he’s not that interested in antisemitism. Mostly he’s interested in women, and his career, but he doesn’t ever stop being a casual, likable antisemite. At the end of the book you go: ‘Oh my God, multiply that by 4 million Germans and you’ve got a movement.’ It’s like in my generation we were culturally trained to be misogynists, homophobes and racists. I guess my thought is that these political movements are mostly made up of millions of people who don’t really care that much, but they slightly lazily err on the side of acquiescing. And when I look at the people who support Trump, they don’t care about politics as much as I do. They’ll say: ‘Well, he’s not racist.’ Or: “How is that racist?’”

‘So many of the things Trump exploited were liberal ideas’ … A rally in Missouri on the eve of the midterm elections. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

These contradictions caused Saunders such difficulty when writing the piece that, he says, “it got rejected three times by the New Yorker. And the first time it was fucking me up so much that I submitted it as an operatic libretto – it was a Trump rally and the immigration advocates were flying overhead, singing – and [the editor] David Remnick was like, ‘I don’t know about this.’ I think the phrase he used was, ‘I appreciate your attempt to be open minded, but I think you’re avoiding the hard work of analysis.’” Saunders bursts out laughing. “Damn straight I am.”

How does he think the political situation might change? “I think what’s probably needed is some amazing figure who can somehow straddle those two worlds as a temporary Band-Aid. If you and I are fighting, for me to continue to insist that you’re wrong – I might be completely justified, as I think the left is – isn’t going to change the dynamic. So if the building is on fire, suddenly that binary changes and we’re saying we gotta get out of here, together. It maybe sounds a little anti-progressive or enabling; I don’t mean that. But if we could get a way of remembering that we’re more than just a left/right divide ... The big hope is that there’d be a transitional figure, a Rorschach that the right would look at and say, ‘Oh, he’s a centrist,’ and the left would say, ‘One of us.’ Biden, maybe? I don’t know.”

The bigger problem, he says, is America. “At some point a great country has to have a great animating principle. And somewhere along the line we mistook materialism for our great animating principle. We’re gonna make so much money, have so many successes – and that isn’t enough, as we know, as human beings. So the way that philosophy or spiritual life got out of our animating principle is interesting. I think [nothing will change] until the country says: ‘Actually, we do believe in a big, moral and ethical principle.’”

In the meantime, Saunders wants to return to writing fiction; it feels to him, in some way, like defiance. Trump governs so much of our attention and time, but “he can’t have that, too”, he says. After he wrote Tenth of December, for a brief period Saunders felt: “I’m getting more mature, and older, and I’m trying to get more positive.” This is not where he is, now. And yet, as his feelings about the US darken – “which career-wise is great, because that comes very naturally to me” – it also throws into definition all the stuff Trump can’t touch: the joy of the book one is writing; the love one has for one’s family. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy, and a lot of power getting more power by shitting on little people, which is the oldest American story.” And yet, he says, “for me the question is: can I get out ahead of that and have a world where all that is true, and yet it is beautiful? And that’s the world we live in. That’s the artistic challenge.”

• Fox 8 is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.