Pastoralia

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
June 2000

Imagine a world where theme park employees live and work in a prefabricated, prehistoric cave and communicate with their families via fax; where an upbeat self-help guru encourages followers to find out "who's been crapping in your oatmeal"; where an improbable romance blossoms at driving school. Welcome to the twisted, profound, and hilarious world of George Saunders. In his new book of short stories, Pastoralia, Saunders returns to the wickedly imaginative world that distinguished his first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

With a voice unlike any other in modern literature, Saunders gives readers a glimpse into the lives of the down-but-not-out, luckless losers who persevere and are oddly hopeful. In the selection below, excerpted from the title story, two employees at a historical theme park share a simulated cave and keep tabs on each other for the management. When Janet starts to slip — cursing at park visitors and drinking in the cave — her coworker must decide what to report to their Big Brother-like boss.

The stories in Pastoralia are nervy, outrageous, sometimes darkly disturbing, but ultimately uplifting — exactly what readers have come to expect from George Saunders.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

A "twisted but amusing" short-story collection set in a slightly skewed version of contemporary America that our booksellers compared to "Edward Gorey." "A riotous, biting satire;" it had booksellers "rolling on the floor." Some of the stories are "downright perverse, but the characters have a disturbingly familiar feel." "Hilarious in places," but often "unsettling." Though it kept most readers up, burning the midnight oil, the "bizarre writing" lulled a few to sleep, which put a drag on the ratings.

San Francisco Chronicle

Wickedly entertaining...Pastoralia is a Dilbert cartoon inked by Samuel Beckett.

Time

Screamingly funny.

Wall Street Journal

Demands to be reread immediately.

New York Times

Artful and sophisticated, truly unusual...exuberantly weird [and] brutally funny.

San Diego Union Tribune

Breathtaking, brutally hilarious satire...a masterpiece of unsettling comedy.

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Sanders's prose is like a drug candy, compulsively swallowed, sweetly addictive.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Saunders's extraordinary talent is in top form in his second collection (after CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), in which his vision of a hellishly (and hopefully) exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America is warmed and impassioned by his regular, irregular and flat-out wacky characters. Merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of the Simpsons, Saunders's five stories and title novella feature protagonists who are losers yet also innocent dreamers: in "Winky," a single guy lives with his sister but hopes to improve his life with his new self-help cult's mantra, "Now is the time for me to win!" The tales pit bleak existences with details so contemporary they're futuristic, as in "Pastoralia," where the narrator is a "re-enactor" who lives in a cave as part of an exhibit in the Pastoralia theme park. Authenticity demands that he speak no English, pretend to draw pictographs on the wall and eat goat. His cave partner, Janet, is driving him crazy, because she uses English, smokes and hates goat; meanwhile, the clumsy, bullying management leans on the narrator to testify against her. In "Sea Oak," the narrator is a beleaguered male stripper who lives with his Aunt Bernie and two other relatives, both clueless, young single mothers whose dialogue consists of trashy talk-show vernacular. They eke out their lives in foggy complacency until the pathetically passive Bernie dies and comes back to life to boss around the household: "I never got nothing! My life was shit! I was never even up in a freaking plane." These characters may not have much, but they do possess the author's compassion, and so are enigmas of decency enshrouded in dark, TV-hobbled dumbness. Saunders, with a voice unlike any other writer's, makes these losers funny, plausible and absolutely winning. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Mimi O'Connor

As in the previous compilation of his work, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders' latest collection turns a scathingly satirical eye on American culture, and the results are disturbingly hilarious and deeply satisfying. Vicious barbs are artfully lobbed at bits of suburban Americana, such as historical theme parks, self-help groups and driver's re-education classes. Beyond these searingly detailed, mundane landscapes, Saunders delivers a delightful cast of characters who are at once compellingly pathetic, unselfconsciously petty and oddly heroic. What makes Saunders' work so appealing is that he does not seem to be writing from the perspective of a cynical urbanite, casting aspersions on his less-sophisticated countrymen with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Instead, his voice is that of someone who has lived in the trenches of mediocrity, on some level embraces the experience and, ultimately, recognizes what he has in common with its inhabitants. The only problem with this collection is that there is simply not enough of it.

Lynne Tillman

[I]n his new collection, Saunders's tales cover larger, more exciting territory, with an abundance of ideas, meanings and psychological nuance. Saunders can be brutally funny . . .
—The New York Times Book Review

Mark Levine

These stories, injected with Saunder's highly original blend of irony and tenderness, ride you down spirals of the absurd and fling you back to your own life, startled. They're more real and more current than today's newspaper.
— Men's Journal

Kirkus Reviews

The freakish, cowed characters filling Saunders's acclaimed debut, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1995), have spawned a new crop of unhappy, scabrously comic campers in these six stories, as the struggle among them to be happy and do the right thing continues. Only the novella-length title story echoes the futuristic feel of CivilWarLand, featuring a theme park complete with a live-caveman display. In the cave are two enactors, the narrator and an older woman, Janet. Although expected to live on-site and stay in their roles all day, whether anyone visits or not, Janet cannot, and the narrator's supervisor pressures him to rat on her. He resists for a long time, feeling sorry for Janet and her now-jailed addict son, yet he finally gives in, which he regrets when she loses it and calls a hectoring visitor a "suckass." Other pieces involve seemingly normal places, home to conflicted men such as Neil in `Winky,` who lives with his sweet, mentally challenged sister and attends a self-help seminar to find a way to tell her to move out. Or boys like Cody in `The End of Firpo in the World,` whose anger at being belittled by his mom and her boyfriend boils over when neighborhood kids laugh at him, and whose desire for revenge results in an accident, unfortunately fatal. There is some hope, however, in `The Barber's Unhappiness,` when a lonely, toeless barber overcomes his repugnance at the size of a woman he met in a driving-safety course enough to date her. Finally, `Sea Oak,` even more fanciful and bizarre than its fellow tales, depicts a stripper-waiter who must deal with his aunt when she returns from the dead, wondering why she never had any fun. Being inside the teeming headsofthese folks is amusing and enlightening. So accurately are they rendered, in all their flawed glory, that they appear not only perfectly human but familiar.