PastoraliaGeorge Saunders
Bloomsbury, paperback, 208 pages, £9.99
Review by David Seabrook (2000)
‛Once we found the loved one nearby with, you know, a cigarette between its lips, wearing a sombrero? These kids today got a lot more nerve than we ever did. I never would’ve dreamed of digging up a dead corpse when I was a teen.’
Here it is, revisited for our entertainment in George Saunders’ second collection of satirical short stories, the new-look land of the free: themed up, dumbed down and laid out ready for embalming. Saunders has been compared to Pynchon and Vonnegut, yet the disgust that fuels his world recalls Nathaniel West. He shares too West’s taste for grotesquery yet these stories are raised above the level of mordant masterpieces by an extra dimension: hope. His characters – living, breathing losers every one – are ultimately left holding the aces. In the final story – ‛The Falls’ – Morse, ‛tall and thin and as gray and sepulchred as a church about to be condemned’, is walking home from work, absorbed in his own rapidly proliferating worries, when he notices that a canoe containing two young girls is out of control and heading toward the Falls. He quickly persuades himself that the girls are doomed, it’s one more tragedy, nothing can be done, and the story builds steadily towards a mournful shrug-off ending, only for Saunders, in the nick of time, to snatch that ending away:
‛They were dead. They were frantic, calling out to him, but they were dead, as dead as the ancient dead, and he was alive, he was needed at home, it was a no-brainer, no one could possibly blame him for this one, and making a low sound of despair in his throat he kicked off his loafers and threw his long ugly body out across the water.’
Like
other characters who struggle through these stories – the toeless
barber, fastidious about women, the pieceworker sick of living with his
backward sister – Morse finds out something important and finds it out
the slow way; he finds out other people are all we’ve got.The title novella concerns the plight of two workers in the Neanderthal Man section of a ‛History of Man’ theme park. Behind the scenes they struggle for survival while out front they go through the prehistoric motions as they wait for visitors to check out their cave. ‛After lunch she goes to the doorway and starts barking out sounds meant to indicate that a very impressive herd of feeding things is thundering past, etc, etc, which of course it is not, the feeding things, being robotic, are right where they always are, across the river. When she barks I garb my spear and come racing up and join her in barking at the imaginary feeding things.’
George Saunders is funny. He’s also worrying. But then again the man’s writing about America, so what do you expect? Over here we’ve a long way to go before we reach the end of the road. And yet as we – all of us now, from airline stewards to transsexual prostitutes – act our daily psychodramas for docusoaps real and imaginary, or queue up to inhabit a house filled with closed circuit cameras in a backstabbing bid for instant stardom, or get ready to play all sorts of other exciting new games that are destined – sure as sixpence – to bring us down lower than snakes in the dust . . . Well, it might be an idea to read this book anyway, and start praying.