George Saunders is a star of sorts.  It started with his well promoted and well received first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  This 1996 collection of short stories struck all the notes expected of serious fiction in contemporary America – irony, the light or deadpan delivery characteristic of our better stand-up comedians, and characters and situations that were often eccentric and frequently bizarre.  The difference was that Saunders did it better than most of his university trained and university employed cohorts.  He also had an edge to his writing, and a focus, that they didn’t have.  Rather than simply striving to come to terms with their sexuality, their family secrets, their struggles to become a writer or their painful eccentricities, Saunders’ characters also strove to come to terms with their jobs.  In other words they were all striving to make a buck…and not doing real well at it either.  In that respect they were like the majority of Americans, perhaps one reason for his hefty sales.  The fact that Saunders took any notice at all of the socio-economic situations of his characters attracted attention.  The term “distopias” came into vogue when discussing his stories – anti-utopias comically extrapolated from our current conditions.  For all these reasons (along with a large publicity budget) his long awaited second collection attracted the sort of advance interest rarely accorded any writer nowadays other than Stephen King.

            And now it’s here.  Pastoralia, Saunders’ second collection, consists of six generally longish stories that exhibit the same broad comedy and sensitivity to the absurdities of contemporary American speech as the first book.  The main character in the first and title story, for instance, spends his time impersonating a caveman in a historical theme park.  He hunts for edible bugs, grunts, and pretends to paint Lascaux-like murals while paying customers peek into the cave’s mouth and comment on how much better we have it today.  He is forbidden to leave the cave except for periodic trips to empty his refuse containers and visit the company store.  He is alternately harangued and starved by his bosses and he reminds himself of the company motto, “Thinking Positive/Saying Positive” to maintain the strength he needs to support his sick child, many miles away.  The child is getting sicker.

In the second story, “Winky,” Neil Yaniky strives to overcome what American politicians and social scientists call the culture of low expectations by attending a rally where a famous and highly paid motivational speaker reveals his secret mantra: “Now Is the Time for Me to Win!”

Then there’s a male exotic dancer in “Sea Oak,” a violent loser of a boy (with his painfully cheap and unfashionable tennis shoes) in “The End of FIRPO in the World,” a middle-aged self-employed onanist in “The Barber’s Unhappiness” and a struggling (and losing) family man in “The Falls.”  With all of them Saunders hits the same notes he struck in his first book, but as with a successful musical composition, reiteration deepens the theme.  Is there no limit Saunders’ first collection seemed to ask in its comical way – no limit beyond which the bosses and the organizations and what we loosely call life cannot push us?   Thus the talk of distopias, negative yet fanciful alternate worlds.  This second collection makes it clear that, in Saunders’ view, there is no limit.  There is no longer any law, or line, or limit beyond which the powerful cannot push us.  No fanciful distopias here, just current and present reality, albeit reality described with a measure of slapstick.  That’s the aspect of Saunders’ work that remains invisible (and perhaps unthinkable) to the reviewers, most of whom hew to the official view of reality as strictly as any party hack in the old Soviet Union. 

Publication data: Pastoralia by George Saunders, Penguin Putnam, New York, 2000.