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Interview
Knuckle-puller makes good
George Saunders talks about the bumpy road that led to his strange but far-from-implausible fiction.
By Laura Miller
[04/26/00]

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[04/25/00]

Reviews
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[04/25/00]

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It all sounds (and often feels) horribly bleak. Nevertheless, Saunders is also a tremendously funny writer. Like all great humorists, he understands and mines the close kinship of the horse laugh and the morbid shudder, grasping the truth in Dawn Powell's famous dictum that "true wit should break a wise man's heart." There are precious few wise men in Saunders' jesting dispatches, but there is ample heartbreak -- and that, especially in his new collection of stories, turns out to be a distinctly saving grace.

Pastoralia By George Saunders Riverhead Books, 208 pages Fiction Also Today Knuckle-puller makes good George Saunders talks about the bumpy road that led to his strange but far from implausible fiction. By Laura Miller Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

Saunders' blurred, amnesiac vision of the American future first gained attention in his accomplished 1996 debut collection, "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." There, Saunders ably captured the alternating moods of resignation and (mostly unintentional, usually unforgiving and always dark) humor that overcame the inhabitants of a surreal, hollow and conglomeratized America of the near future, where things are simultaneously more fastidiously designed and more hopelessly decrepit. Ghosts roamed the grounds of prefab history exhibitions, obese executives crushed their rivals to death, thrill seekers downloaded the memories of others and mutants fled futuristic theme parks that had devolved into brutal medieval city-states.

In "Pastoralia," Saunders takes up briskly where "CivilWarLand" left off: The lead (and title) story here concerns a pair of imagineers confined in an outdoor theme park diorama depicting primitive life. They are forbidden to speak English to each other, to interact with park visitors or to conduct much of anything in the way of a recognizably private life. They grunt, yowl and pretend to catch and eat stray insects. They are paid in goat carcasses and communicate with park management principally by fax.

These communiqués perfectly capture how the unseen, paternalistic park managers have miniaturized employee autonomy to a vanishing point: "Don't talk crazy," one worker-baiting fax memo reads, "Times are hard, entire Units are being eliminated, the Staff Remixing continues ... please, only remember that we are a family, and you are the children, not that we're saying you're immature, only that you do most of the chores while we do all the thinking, and also that we, in our own way, love you."

The story's never-named narrator is a decent enough soul, but gradually grows more and more unnerved, first by dwindling supplies of goat meat, then by cheery managementspeak faxes hinting at impending layoffs and (most of all) by the increasingly surly and dysfunctional conduct of his diorama mate, Janet, who is assailed by unsightly bouts of bitter workplace resentment, family grief and alcohol abuse. Not only does she speak to park visitors in English, she calls one middle-aged Ned Flanders-type dad a "suckass." And that tears it; our narrator, who had heretofore refused to fink out Janet under mounting pressure from the park's management, finally succumbs. He is promptly rewarded with lavish supplies of new food and an attractive new female diorama mate.

Like all of Saunders' stories, this one reads at a deceptively simple level, like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" or an illustration from a situation ethics casebook. But as Saunders' stories often do, it stays with you, and your own sense of its meaning gradually shifts -- until you realize that this one seemingly mundane act of betrayal has fatally encased our protagonist in his primitive persona. As we leave him, he is foraging with renewed vigor for imaginary bugs, at a loss to say or think much of anything -- particularly since his comely new workmate is the very model of officious rectitude, silently reproaching him for deficiencies in his performance technique.

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