Pastoralia [Paperback]

George Saunders (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 1, 2001

Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "graceful, dark, authentic, and funny," George Saunders now surpasses his New York Times Notable Book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, with this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape.

One of Entertainment Weekly’s Ten Best Books of the Year

"Artful and sophisicated... truly unusual. Imagine Lewis's Babbitt thrown into the backseat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar, or Spike Jonze." -- The New York Times

"Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer, and the stories in Pastoralia delight. We're very luck to have them." -- Esquire

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In both his acclaimed debut, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and his second collection, Pastoralia, George Saunders imagines a near future where capitalism has run amok. Consumption and the service economy rule the earth. The Haves are grotesque beings, mutilated by their crass desires and impossible wealth. The Have Nots are no less crippled, both emotionally and physically, by their inferior status. It's a kind of Westworld scenario, but instead of robots, the serving wenches, bellboys, and extras are real people, all of them mercilessly indentured by the free market.

Sounds like bleak stuff, doesn't it? Yet Saunders handles his characters with grace and humor. In the title story, for example, a couple occupies a squalid corner of a human zoo, where they act out a parody of caveman times, communicating in grunts and hand motions (speaking is instantly punishable by the Orwellian management) and conducting their lives during 15-minute smoke breaks. In "Winky," a born loser (really, all of Saunders's characters are born losers) visits a self-help seminar, where he's encouraged to rid himself of all those people who are "crapping in your oatmeal." Exhilarated at the prospect of dumping his simple, crazy-haired, religion-besotted sister, he returns home to the bleak discovery that he needs her as much as she needs him. The protagonist of "Sea Oak" works as a stripper in an aviation-themed restaurant and lives next to a crack house with his unemployed sisters, their babies, and a sweet old maid of an aunt. The aunt dies, and then returns from the grave--not so sweet, now, and still decomposing--with strange powers and a sobering message:

You ever been in the grave? It sucks so bad! You regret all the things you never did. You little bitches are going to have a very bad time in the grave unless you get on the stick, believe me!

The characters and situations in the rest of Pastoralia are equally wretched. But Saunders rescues them from utter despair with a loving belief in the triumph of the human spirit: yes, things can always get worse, but worse is better than the cold dirt of the grave. And in the small space between wretchedness and death there is plenty of room for laughter, and even love. --Tod Nelson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; Reissue edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573228729
• ISBN-13: 978-1573228725
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Author

More About the Author

George Saunders's political novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was published by Riverhead Trade Paperbacks in September 2005. He is also the author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, both New York Times Notable Books, and The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a New York Times children's bestseller. In 2000, The New Yorker named him one of the "Best Writers Under 40." He writes regularly for The New Yorker and Harper's, as well as Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. He won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2004 and his work is included in Best American Short Stories 2005. He teaches at Syracuse University.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#89 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#96 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#89 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#96 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking for happiness in all the usual, wrong places February 5, 2003

By Susan O'Neill

Format:Paperback

The first story in this book, the title story, grabbed me immediately. I laughed aloud, delighted at the inventiveness of Saunders' depiction of the corporate culture, as seen through the eyes of a poor working stiff in the pre-historic-land exhibit of a theme park. And really, be it a cubicle or a cave, corporate jargon or grunts and gestures, the author reinforces a universal truth: we are a flawed species, and when pressed, we default to some very strange, very typical behavior. His characters are both bizarre and entirely recognizable: so many hapless, imperfect souls stuck in an even more imperfect world, trying to find happiness in spite of themselves--even, in one case, in spite of being dead. As Pogo was known to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Saunders' sense of humor elevates our mundane dance with discontent to a charming, hilarious, sad, familiar but refreshing jig.

Susan O'Neill
Author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam

(Ballantine Books, 2001)

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Compassionately cruel May 19, 2000

By Colin Dobin

Format:Hardcover

George Saunders is weird and then some. The America in his short stories is light years away from the picture postcard vision of sun-drenched cornfields swaying in the wind.

In the short story that gives the book its title, Pastoralia is the sort of theme park that would give Disney executives a heart attack. Visitors see people as they lived in past epochs, such as the couple who play Neanderthal cave dwellers, daubing prehistoric paintings on walls, making unintelligible grunting noises and roasting goats. But, there are few visitors to the park and the "cavewoman" Janet is cracking up under the pressure of mounting debts and a drug-addicted son.

She downs a bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon and starts using the sort of expletives no Neanderthal man would know.

In the best and funniest story, Sea Oak, a down-at-heel, bickering family tries to make ends meet in a housing estate that gives new meaning to the term concrete jungle. They spend most of their time mindlessly watching television. The stations have run out of Worst Accidents or When Animals Attack videos and have to resort to The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never happened but theoretically could. A child hit by a train is catapulted into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts off his hand chopping wood and while staggering screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.

Sea Oak is a modern parable. The family's dead granny comes back from the grave to tell them to get their act together but, unlike the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, she just won't go away, but sits putrefying in her favourite armchair.

"In the morning she's still there, shaking and swearing.

" 'Take the blanket off!' she screams. 'It's time to get this show on the road.'

"I take the blanket off. The smell is not good. One ear is now in her lap. She keeps absentmindedly sticking it back on her head."

Sea Oak is like one long-running sick joke, where you know you shouldn't laugh, but can't help yourself.

Saunders sees humour in misfortune, loneliness and deformity, but it is a cruel humour laced with compassion and that makes his stories not just palatable, but at times moving and wickedly funny.

The misfits he describes are not outcasts to him. The sky may be a different colour on their planet, but the space they inhabit is as real to them as the lives so-called normal people lead.

Not all the stories are consistently good. I read The End of FIRPO In The World three times and still haven't the faintest idea what it's about. But at his best, the arrows that he fires at the alienating culture of urban America hit their mark.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Rather Repetitive December 17, 2006

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This collection of six stories was my first exposure to Saunders, and it strikes me that the format and context probably wasn't the best for enjoying his sharp writing. I believe all of these stories originally appeared in magazines, and the problem is that by reading one a day over the course of a week, the similarities in setting, tone, theme, character become glaringly obvious. This doesn't mean the writing isn't good, but the collectivization of these stories certainly robs each of its individual power.

The book opens with the title story, which at almost 70 pages, is really more of a novella. It's narrated by a historic reenactor who lives as a caveman in a kind of diorama for the entertainment/education at an odd theme park. From nightly faxes we learn of his exhausted wife, deathly ill son, and the mounting medical bills which are his reason for this rather extreme form of employment. The real tension derives from his "partner", a blowsy "cavewoman" who has plenty of problems of her own, but can't be bothered to stay entirely within character during working hours. Rambling corporate memos start to appear, warning of layoffs, and the narrator has to decide whether or not to snitch on his coworker. The underlying message of this parable is that modern capitalism places many of us in ridiculous meaningless jobs where we are constantly pitted against each other. Message received.

The second story, "Winky", is probably my favorite in the book. We meet a shlub of a single guy as he attends a cheezy self-help seminar whose catchphrase is "Now is the time for me to win!" Fired up, he resolves to kick his weird religious sister out of his house so he can get on with his life, but when push comes to shove, shedding the people who are "crapping in your oatmeal" from your life isn't as easy as it sounds. "Sea Oak" is narrated by another single shlub living with grating kinfolk. This one works as a male waiter/stripper while, in between bouts of slap fighting, his sister and cousin watch TV shows like "How My Child Died Violently" or "The Worst That Could Happen." The funniest part of the book is the description of the latter: "a half hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually happened but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves." Their lives are turned upside down when their hard-working but passive Aunt Bernice dies -- only to come back as a home truth-spouting zombie.

At a brief ten pages, "The End of FIRPO in the World" (a boy's stream of consciousness thoughts as he cycles around his neighborhood) fails to leave much of an impression. Next, "The Barber's Unhappiness," summons forth yet another single shlub, this time a middle-aged barber who lives with his demanding aging mother. His inner thoughts are rendered in depressing and yet hilarious detail as he tries to work out whether or not the woman who smiled at his at a driver's ed class is worth pursuing. (Note: this story is available as a free audio download if you search the internet.) The final story, "The Falls", breaks the mold by presenting the inner thoughts of two narrators and their view of each other as they pass in the woods.

As mentioned before, the characters are pretty repetitive. Most glaring are the protagonists in three of the stories who are are single, friendless males whose paths to a better life are allegedly held down by the annoying female relatives they live with. They are all paralyzed in the face of the same basic problem -- the emptiness of life. A number of reviewers write about the author's "compassion" for his characters, but when you have the same kinds of characters facing the same issues over and over, it gets rather difficult to care about any of them. Similarly, those in positions of authority -- the caveman's manager, the self-help guru, the stripper's manager, etc. all speak in the exact same garbled upbeat corpate-speak-meets-stream-of-consciousness, which only lessens the intended satire. It's distinctive, and certainly funny at times, but strikes the same note over and over.

Ultimately, it's a little hard to see what all the fuss is about with Saunders. Yes, the stories are well-written and yes they are commenting on contemporary American culture. Are they doing so in an interesting way? Not especially. Many reviewers seem to find the plotting and characters somehow wacky, which only seems to point to a certain lack of breadth in reading. While they're not all entirely realistic, they're not light years away from reality either -- kind of like Jonathan Lethem at his mildest.