[An old review. No reason for putting it here beyond liking one or two of the sentences, and the continuation of the Rocio thing not being quite ready]

George Saunders – Pastoralia
So here we have it. Another tape-guided solo electric vehicle tour around LifeWorld®, the theme park that’s like…you know…REAL. And what a jerking, whining, battery-powered ride it is. Pastoralia is the second collection of short stories from George Saunders, America’s leading purveyor of odd-shaped fictional tools for picking the holes in the American dream.

These are the stories of people who never got their promised 15 minutes: the ugly, the balding, and toothless, the too tall, the too fat, the too mothered, the unwanted. Characters who were trampled under in the foundations of the human pyramid, still desperately thumbing self-help books and combing thinning hair in patented rejuvenating mirrors, still holding out some tuxedo hope in a threadbare suit. Characters who never got enough, or even never asked. The leftovers after the rest of us have made our killings.

It’s a deeply compassionate book, full of sadness, a sense of injustice and a sharp eye for the half-truths that fuel the elbow-dash for cash or status. Saunders’ jaundiced view is conveyed with a voice that is wonderfully attuned to the language and easygoing misbehaviour of all-incorporating corporate life. Casual customer evaluation reports control the lives of underlings in seedy tourist attractions. A self-made self-help business guru preaches his mantra: ‘Now is the Time for You to Win’. Everything is Capitalised (in both senses). Characters squat in their Separate Areas, unable to communicate – it’s against Regulations.

Like Catch 22, what starts out somehow charming, with oddball characters in elliptic orbits around a moving off-centre, slowly escalates into something bitter, incisive, even horrific, although still darkly, outrageously, painfully funny. And funny it is. This is a snigger on the bus book, a stuff hand in mouth in a meeting book, and a book that can’t be easily explained:

BYSTANDER: So what’s so funny?

YOU: Well; there’s this kid who’s completely unloved at home, so much so that his mum and stepdad have got a special name for him which they pretend is a term of endearment, but which isn’t, and who responds by living a fantasy life to such an extent that he ends up getting run over by a car and killed, unable to embrace any sense of self-worth despite the redemptive efforts of the last person he talks with.

All six stories scuttle about in the shadows of that same 51st State that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his first collection, mapped so effectively;and they need to be read, by everyone who ever believed any of the inch-thick PR plastered over the writing on the wall:

Let me tell you something. Something about this country. Anybody can do anything. But first they gotta try. And you guys ain’t…You kids make squat. And therefore you live in a dangerous craphole. And what happens in a dangerous craphole? Bad tragic shit. It’s the freaking American way – you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion. But at this rate you ain’t even gonna make it to the somewhat less dangerous craphole.

(Sea Oak)

It is the freaking American way. And when trickle-down has trickled away, and evaluations have denied us value, apple pie be praised we can still slouch over to literary satire’s top table, where George Saunders is picking over the National Carcass and finding the wishbone already broken.