Word: pastoralia
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...CivilWarland,” employees are subjected to horrific violence when some of the real dead simulated in their Civil War recreations come back to haunt them. In the eponymous theme-park of his second collection, “Pastoralia,” impatient visitors and their bratty children pay to observe individuals dressed up as Cro-Magnons, who are allowed to speak only in grunts in the ersatz cave that is their workplace. (They can curse at their own misbehaving offspring, fax evaluations of each other’s daily performance, chainsmoke, bicker, flirt, and so on, only after...
Trickle-down economics has not yet sunk to the places that the people in George Saunders' fiction must, for want of a better fortune, call home. The hilariously hapless heroes of the six stories in Pastoralia (Riverhead Books; 188 pages; $22.95) live as adults with their crotchety mothers or religiously obsessed sisters or a menagerie of squabbling relatives. The beleaguered breadwinner in Sea Oak works as a male stripper at Joysticks, a club with an aviation motif, and notes of his lodgings, "At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear...
...narrator of Pastoralia, the title story, has things even worse. He lives in a cave, albeit a fake one, that is an exhibit in a mysterious, at least to him, theme park. He and Janet, his cavewoman partner, are supposed to perform daily Stone Age tasks--cooking a goat, working on pictographs, grabbing and pretending to eat insects--for the benefit of spectators, but hardly anyone comes by to observe them anymore. The fax machine in the caveman's private quarters spits out ominous messages from the park management: "Those of you who have no need to be worried should...
...characters in Pastoralia try desperately to clamber up out of their ruts. In Winky, Neil Yaniky goes to a local Hyatt to hear a self-help guru named Tom Rodgers tell the paying guests how to get other people to stop "crapping in your oatmeal." Yaniky adopts the speaker's recommended mantra--"Now is the time for me to win"-- but can't muster the appalling selfishness to act on those words and kick his deranged sister out of his house...
...more moronic? Check out what Saunders' people watch: How My Child Died Violently or The Worst That Could Happen, "a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually happened but theoretically could." Ever felt that your job is the equivalent of a theme-park exhibit? Pastoralia will not refute such subversive notions, but it makes them tolerably, screamingly funny...
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