Hilariously
Hapless Heroes
George Saunders offers
fine satiric tales about crotchety relatives, dead-end jobs
and lost dreams
By PAUL GRAY
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 (Bloomsbury; 188 pages) 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 view of FedEx."
The 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 not in the least be worried.
As for those who should be worried, it's a little late to
start worrying now, you should have started months ago."
The 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.
A character in The Falls daydreams about the greatness that
has somehow eluded him: "His childhood dreams had been so
bright, he had hoped for so much, it couldn't be true that
he was a nobody, although, on the other hand, what kind of
somebody spends the best years of his life swearing at a photocopier?"
That concluding question typifies the sort of humor that
Saunders consistently wrings out of his characters' constrained
existences. These losers are too self-aware to pity, and the
world they perceive is unsettlingly familiar. Think TV can't
get any 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.
|
|
|
January 29, 2001
| No. 4
COVER
STORIES
COVER:
People Power-the Sequel
Abandoned by even his closest allies, President Joseph Estrada gives in
to the crowds on Manila's streets and agrees to make room for Vice President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
New Boss:
Arroyo returns to the palace she grew up in
A
S I A
CHINA:
Contraband in Cribs
The one-child policy spawns a harrowing trade in infants
T
H E A R T S
BOOKS: The gladiatorial thrills and galley-slave tedium of sperm-whale
hunting
Unraveling the enigma of Ho
Chi Minh
George Saunders' bizarre
suburbia
MUSIC:
A homage to musical Renegades
CINEMA:
Why Penélope Cruz is the belle of Hollywood
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
|
|
