With Pastoralia, his second collection of stories, George Saunders stakes his claim to the literary equivalent of [Richard] Pryor’s old title ...Saunders’s stories are populated and often narrated by sad sacks caught between the odd and false worlds of their workplaces and their real and horrendous family circumstances ...Saunders enjoys juxtaposing the euphemisms of corporate speak with the candidness of colloquial speech...will jam high and low idioms together within speeches for maximum contrast, fashioning a new tongue from old clichés and more recently coined buzzwords ...fast and furious, never simply whimsical or goofy, and he so successfully delivers his pitiful characters that the reader feels at bottom some gravity or emotional anchor, even when what’s happening is loopy ... As in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, there’s a damaged American heart at the center of Pastoralia, except it’s the reader who’s laughing so hard that it hurts.
Luckily, Saunders is good at the cynical one-liner, and most of the stories in Pastoralia do comment on reality. But do they take place there? No. And it all starts with a speculation on how to get through a crappy, and very science fictional, day job ... But of course the characters do talk. They talk a lot. And the problems they’re experiencing aren’t necessarily directly related to their plight in this absurd job. Primarily, their concerned about keeping the job, as management is constantly making veiled overtures that a 'remixing' will occur soon, resulting in many people being out of work ...hard to communicate here is what a unique prose stylist Saunders is ... If dark humor and humanistic stories about bizarre minutia are your thing, you’ll love the stories of Pastoralia.
Like Flannery O'Connor and Nathanael West, Saunders knows that you can mine the banal for humor. The darkest and most deviant (and, let's face it, most pathetic) plots of the greedy human heart are hatched on the 'Look, it's Andre' level, which is where they are also usually crossed ... There are six stories in this collection. Four of them are very good, and the other two are at least good — a success average that is highly unusual for a short-story collection ...Saunders stories are on such a high level is close to miraculous ... the harmonic structure of my sonic response to this book would be imaged, by the sound spectrogram, as an evenly spaced stack of short horizontal lines, with a fundamental frequency of about 260 hertz. In other words, I laughed my ass off.
Pastoralia: a good name for a theme park. It suggests rural simplicity tweaked, enhanced by modern technology and superior management skills. Though George Saunders uses it as the title of a story set in a theme park, it could also be his wry comment on the circumstances of the unnamed narrator, whose job is to impersonate a caveman ...succeed in squeezing meaning and emotional resonance out of absurd, post-real predicaments. His satirical jabs are sharp and scary, but also sad and unexpectedly touching ... Saunders specialises in giving losers — the ugly, the weak, the self-absorbed — a flicker of appeal or delusional hope ... Saunders's stories present an unsettling amalgam of degraded language and high art: slogans, jargon and the crippling incoherence of daily speech, arranged on the page with meticulous care ... He's a self-erasing author, happy to let other voices do the work.
...George Saunders takes his place in a long queue of American pessimists, but few can claim a vision as corrosive and bleakly funny as the one on display in Pastoralia, a story cycle set in a hellish wasteland of late capitalism. Boasting a spare, economical prose style, Saunders takes snapshots with a cracked lens, only slightly distorting the worst images he can find ...stories are equally grim but more internalized... Saunders' characters are unhealthy, uneducated, and hopeless, yet he reserves sympathy and affection for them, his satiric venom generally saved for larger targets.
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... Only the novella-length title story echoes the futuristic feel of CivilWarLand, featuring a theme park complete with a live-caveman display ... Other pieces involve seemingly normal places, home to conflicted men such as Neil in 'Winky'... Being inside the teeming heads of these folks is amusing and enlightening. So accurately are they rendered, in all their flawed glory, that they appear not only perfectly human but familiar.
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... 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.
