Pastoralia

There may be no short story writer alive than George Saunders, and that’s no small praise; indeed, you could even argue that with his talent, he ranks among the great writers of the day, full stop. (How his talent will hold up in novel form, I look forward to discovering when his first novel is released next week.) Veering between social commentary and dark satire, between biting comedy and empathetic character studies, Saunders brings his bizarre, off-kilter worlds to life with his rich, fascinating prose and compelling dialogue. His second short story collection, Pastoralia, is no exception, making me laugh out loud frequently while never shirking from his craft. As always, Saunders love of bizarre, excessive amusement/theme parks is evident, whether it’s the recreated Stone Age cave of the title story (where the actors are expected to stay in character even when no one else is around, and the corporate management communicates through bizarre, rambling memos) or the intricately structured strip club of “Sea Oak.” But he also loves his misfits, whether it’s the bullied young man of “The End of FIRPO in the World,” the harried title character in “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” or the motivational speaker attendee of “Winky”, who just wants to work up the nerve to kick his sister out. Indeed, pretty much every character has their struggles, their neuroses, their fears, and all of them fear that life has passed them by – and in most cases, it has. In lesser hands, that would depressing, bleak fare. But Saunders’ prose and observational style make his stories uproariously funny at times, as characters lose themselves in imagining how others will treat them, engage in long dialogues with themselves, or the situations just get increasingly bizarre. From actors playing cavemen trying to ignore faxes to ghosts that do little more than angrily yell at everyone, from unlikely heroes to fantasy lives that far surpass anything in waking lives, Saunders infuses all of it with a sense of wry wit, but also affection for his characters that keeps the stories from being bleak. Instead, they become universal, clinging to big feelings and emotions that we all have, satirizing human (and corporate) foibles beautifully, and just generally entertaining with their absurdity, heart, and soul. In other words, it’s more typical greatness from Saunders, who seems incapable of doing anything less than creating rich worlds and complex characters, all without missing a beat with his offbeat prose and rich descriptions. And if you can’t empathize with his flawed, failing, but still human characters, then I can’t imagine that you’ve lived any kind of life at all, because these are universal tales. Off the wall, funny, and satirical, and yet universal in the best way.

As I read the novella, Pastoralia, I was reminded of the trapped souls in Kafka’s writings. Here, two characters are a part of a primitive cave man display where they must prepare food over an open fire (when they receive a goat or a hare). They pick bugs and in the cave as they act as if they are real caveman. But behind the walls in their private quarters, where they can go when off-duty, there is a fax machine that is their link to the outside. There, they also have soft drinks and other luxuries that they are unable to enjoy while playing the part of a cave dweller. The people who run the theme park go to great lengths to save money (charging them for disposing their human waste) and making crazy arguments as why they have no other option. But the two employees are so dependent on the organization, so they keep playing the game, hoping each day to have a goat to roast. In “Winky,” we’re taken to a “get-rich-quick” convention where those in attendance wear hats colored for how far they have come in the process of becoming wealthy. Like many such schemes, the message is partly religious, but instead of failure due to one’s lack of effort, it’s because of others are holding you back. “God doesn’t make junk,” they’re told. “If you’re losing, somebody’s doing it to you.” The scheme sets people up to focus on their needs and to challenge or remove those from their lives that hold them back. Getting ahead is the only thing that matters. The short story, “Sea Oak” is about people trapped in lives from which they are unable to escape. It’s a world turned upside down. To make a living (in the hope of escaping to a better neighborhood), the protagonists works at “Joysticks,” where men partly strip and serve women (but they can’t completely strip) and earn titles. The best men become “pilots” although they are still stripping and serving as they parade around with their private parts slightly clad. The customers rate the men and when your rating falls to “stinker,” you’re out the door. Saunders has turned the world upside down as I couldn’t help but to think of a time when flight attendants were “sexualized” but instead of men looking at women, it’s reversed. “Sea Oak” is the dumpy community where the protagonist lives. He’d like to escape, but there is no way out. To escape, there’s the television with reality TV-like shows such as “The Worst that Could Happen.” The aunt dies and the family struggles over how to bury her. They would be in debt for seven years to give her something nice, but the funeral home as other options such as painted cardboard boxes. But she comes back to life, only to fall apart, one body part at a time. Even the hope of resurrection is hollow in this story. There are several additional stories in this collection. Saunders stories are funny, but sad. As they describe people trapped, I found them to be very Kafkaesque. Both writers describe hopeless situations. In Saunder’s stories, people place their hopes on bizarre schemes to escape, but no one (especially not the reader) believes they have a change. These stories, I found, are very political in a subtle way as if by telling them, those who are trapped with realize how the system is rigged against them and no longer play the game using rules that keep them from improving their lives.

Despite being a subscriber to The New Yorker, I had not read any of George Saunders work until purchasing this book (I read the non-fiction almost exclusively, something I now need to re-consider). My loss! His writing is something very different, expressing human experiences overlaid into circumstances completely unexpected and unique. It is almost impossible to describe the cover story (which makes up approximately one third of the book) without ruining the surprise - of the setting and the interactions - so I am going to summarize it in this way, which will be recognizable to anyone familiar with the story and may also give those unfamiliar with it a feel for the style of the writing: --- Do I note any attitudinal difficulties with this writer? I do not. How do I rate this writer overall? Very good. Are there any Situations which require Mediation with this writer? There are not. I post it now. --- I also want to thank the other reviewer who mentioned the 99% Invisible radio show episode that told the story of the Geico "So easy, a caveman could do it" advertising campaign, and the influence of this story on the writer responsible for creating that campaign. The other stories - there are six in all, including Pastoralia - are equally unique and good.

I had the unfortunate experience of downloading this book for my Kindle, not bothering to check the page count. My initial goal was to find a used copy somewhere in the neighborhood, but it turns out Saunders' books are rarely in stock. Even used copies on Amazon are expensive, expensive enough to second-guess paying a pretty high price for a book containing only a few stories. First off, the title story is great. Classic Saunders, enjoyable from start to finish. The idea of a human zoo (and its connection with the outside world) is one of Saunders' best. "Winky" is good, but partially forgettable because it just never fully takes off. "Sea Oak" is the most enjoyable in the entire book, and it also happens to be the weirdest. A male stripper, a relative who comes back from the grave, and an opportunity to escape poverty by any means necessary. This is the type of Saunders story that makes your eyes glaze over from time to time, your mind churning relentlessly to comprehend the underlying theme. How far would you go to escape poverty? How does your relationship with your family affect your relationship with the economy? Great stuff. The remaining three stories are good, not great, and when the book is finished you'll find yourself satisfied but wondering: couldn't this have been priced a little lower? I think if I'd enjoyed more of the stories, I'd be less obsessed over whether I got my money's worth. Search your local library first.

The five stars is for "Sea Oak," the middle story in this short collection. I read it as part of The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction for a class and was knocked over and trampled on unlike any short story had ever done before. I found out what book was in and bought it new so George Saunders might get some sort of money for it. "Sea Oak" is gritty, strange, grotesque, and ultimately compassionate. I don't want to give anything away, but it's the story of a low-, lower-class family struggling to get by. The male narrator works as a stripper while his sister and cousin both raise their own babies and try to get their GED. Their sunny Aunt Bernie works at DrugTown and tries to tell everyone to be thankful for what they have. But, really, they have nothing to be thankful for. The story takes some bizarre, sometimes frightening, supernatural turns. It left me in tears. The other stories in this collection did not shake me as much as "Sea Oak" did, although the title novella, "Pastoralia" is full of imagination and wit. It follows two people who work at some sort of museum/theme park. They must pretend to be cavemen all day long, as though they're living anthropological experiments. The narrator's co-worker, Janet, is a bad caveman. She talks in English and insults the customers. Yet, the narrator is expected to review her every day and fax it in to the corporate office. Every day he says she's fine, unwilling to "cave" in to the corporate pressure to narc on another human being. Of course, there wouldn't be a story if this didn't change, but I'll leave it at that. There are four other stories, including one about a self-help guru, a kid who is a loser, and an adult who is a loser. Their tone is similar, but they're distinct and interesting in their own way. Compelled to give them star ratings, I'd give them all a four, with "Pastoralia" getting a 4.5.

Pastoralia by George Saunders This book is a riot of language and character and if you read it, you won’t ever forget it. Pastoralia is a collection of six stories: Pastoralia, Winky, Sea Oak, The End of Firpo in the World, The Barber’s Unhappiness, and The Falls. Each has its particular nervous, urgent, pressing voice that takes you into the characters lives, challenges, hopes and fears. It is in equal parts darkly funny and deeply troubling. There are slivers of hope. Pastoralia made me think of Charles Portis’ The Dog of the South, but on speed. Both focus on specimens of society gone wrong, or simply bumping along the bottom, but with hope still not extinguished. George Saunders’ characters reflect at their sort at 100mph, while Charles Portis’ are more slow-motion car crashes. Both make heroes from the underdog and those (almost) trodden underfoot. To give you an introduction without spoiling the plot: Pastoralia is about a man and a woman acting as cavemen/women in a modern zoo, while real world pressures bear down on them from the outside. Imagine that this is your job and your life depended on it; Winky is a weak little man taking a self-assertion course to deal with a dear challenge in his life; Sea Oak focuses on a male club stripper trying to drum up funds for his family stuck in misery. Things go wrong, then very very strange; The End of Firpo in the World is about a boy on a bicycle travelling just as fast in his mind as on his out-of-control bike. The Barber’s Unhappiness deals with power, love & lust, social perception and critical self-deception, and self-destructive criticism. The Falls is about watery ends and a little bit of hope, maybe. These are recounted at super high-speed language, with huge sentences where the reader dances from despair, to hope, to judgement of others, to self-criticism, to self-embellishment, to honour and loyalty, to betrayal, and back. The commas are little stepping stones for readers to jump left, right and on. So, for writers looking for tools of the craft – look at the voice, the voices of his characters. All of them are so real, they could be alive in grotty parts of your city, fighting to make ends meet, to realise the dreams despite all. Some of the voices might aggress you, render you nervous, but all are worth listening to and learning from. And, look at George Saunders’ self-asserted freedom of language, allowing himself labyrinthine sentences that sing, grammatical errors that are just right for the voices he shares. When one is a master of language, one can write one’s own rules.

A confession: I have been racing through several of Saunders' short story collections and am not sure which came from where. But this collection has "The Barber's Unhappiness," a comic masterpiece that had me laughing out loud more than once, so I vote for this one. As a woman-obsessed bachelor with a Walter Mitty imagination, the barber is one of the most pathetic protagonists I've ever encountered, and proof that Saunders can create great comic riffs with panache, succeeding at one of the most difficult forms of writing. Most often the weaver of dark tableaux of loony amusement parks and bizarre concentration camps, recounted from the point of view of the inhabitants, Saunders creates metaphors for our social straight jackets equal to anything Beckett ever invented. Influenced by Hemingway when a fledgling writer, he may have thus acquired a brilliant ability to put the reader "in media res" and flesh out one or another bizarre worlds with breathtaking economy. His touch is always light and usually comic, though often paranoia-invoking, since corporate and classist regimes are hardly far removed from our own. He is a writer for our times, or at least if feels so to me. The personal fit—reflective of impending global tragedy, not to mention our American dystopia, of our collective angst confronting a seriously broken society, taken together with my own need to mock the situation, to laugh derisively at our sorry predicament—is amazing. So timely is Saunders for me that it's difficult to say whether he's great literature of just extremely good at what he does. But it's not for me to say anyway, is it? For those looking for more depth of feeling, "Lincoln in the Bardo" may be the answer. That is Saunders' novel and, tied to history, is furthest from satire. But I prefer Saunders the descendant of Swift and Kafka and Beckett and, as they say, Vonnegut and Pynchon, whose American efforts never impressed me as much as this writer's.

It took me a while to get through the title track, but after that, I couldn't put this book down. Right down to Aunt Bernie coming back from the dead and telling me to live life with all I've got while slamming her left arm on the table with her right. The angles at which Mr. Saunder's comes at with this stuff is genius and disarming. The shorter stories taken from the protagonist point of view, whether its a 10 year old kid riding his bike in a cloud of confusion as he tries to sort out his vision of his neighborhood just before another disarming event or a guy walking along a river so absorbed in his own thoughts not realizing a disaster just passed him by, man, this is all food for thought. I'm not sure who Mr. Saunder's influences are and maybe that's not important. These short stories are all thought provoking. And like they say, you aren't the same after you go to Paris, well, maybe you won't be the same after reading some George Saunders. For the better, that is.

Quirky, interesting story. The rest of the stories were fairly similar.

I love George Saunders' writing, and The Tenth of December may be one of my favourite books of last year. These stories are not near as gut wrenching, although that cannot be said of "The End of FIRPO in the world." The story "Sea Oak" is worth the price of admission alone.

Vous refermez ce recueil de six nouvelles et vous vous sentez une autre personne, meilleure, plus "décente". Et vous en sortez dans l'hilarité. Avec mordant, intelligence, compassion, originalité et humour, Saunders nous livre une collection de paraboles, de textes satiriques, d'une imagination sans limite, parfois ridicules, émouvants, prodigues de métaphores. Il nous entraîne à 1000 lieues de la réalité, on est en plein rêve ou en plein délire, puis on tourne la page et il se montre le chroniqueur le plus pointu d'une certaine 'corporate America'. On assimile parfois Saunders à Vonnegut; j'y retrouve plutôt la tendresse freaky de Flannery O'Connor.

Not my favorite type of reading. Should have read previews before ordering it. I'm just not a sci-fi fan. Did like Lincoln in the Bardo though.

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