Word: pastoralia
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Trickle-down economics has not yet sunk to the places that the people in George Saunders' fiction must, for want of a better fortune, call home. The hilariously hapless heroes of the six stories in Pastoralia (Riverhead Books; 188 pages; $22.95) live as adults with their crotchety mothers or religiously obsessed sisters or a menagerie of squabbling relatives. The beleaguered breadwinner in Sea Oak works as a male stripper at Joysticks, a club with an aviation motif, and notes of his lodgings, "At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear...
...narrator of Pastoralia, the title story, has things even worse. He lives in a cave, albeit a fake one, that is an exhibit in a mysterious, at least to him, theme park. He and Janet, his cavewoman partner, are supposed to perform daily Stone Age tasks--cooking a goat, working on pictographs, grabbing and pretending to eat insects--for the benefit of spectators, but hardly anyone comes by to observe them anymore. The fax machine in the caveman's private quarters spits out ominous messages from the park management: "Those of you who have no need to be worried should...
...characters in Pastoralia try desperately to clamber up out of their ruts. In Winky, Neil Yaniky goes to a local Hyatt to hear a self-help guru named Tom Rodgers tell the paying guests how to get other people to stop "crapping in your oatmeal." Yaniky adopts the speaker's recommended mantra--"Now is the time for me to win"-- but can't muster the appalling selfishness to act on those words and kick his deranged sister out of his house...
...more moronic? Check out what Saunders' people watch: How My Child Died Violently or The Worst That Could Happen, "a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually happened but theoretically could." Ever felt that your job is the equivalent of a theme-park exhibit? Pastoralia will not refute such subversive notions, but it makes them tolerably, screamingly funny...
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