When George Saunders’s first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a “brilliant new satirist” with a voice “astoundingly tuned.” Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. In fact, that prominent periodical was so impressed by Saunders that it originally published all six of the stories in his new collection, Pastoralia. If that were not encouragement enough, three stories in Pastoralia won O. Henry Awards prizes: “The Falls” in 1997 (which won second prize), “Winky” in 1998, and “Sea Oak” in 1999.
The reviewers of Saunders’s two collections have called him variously “a cool satirist,” “a savage satirist,” and a “searing satirist.” Typical of the satirist’s need for an object of attack, Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target; however, he self-deprecatingly notes, “like the hunting dog who trots out to get the pheasant,” he usually comes back with “the lower half of a Barbie doll.” Comparing Saunders to Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, critics praised his demented black comic view of modern culture.
A primary way Saunders creates this view is to zero in on American pop culture entertainments. Whereas the focus of the title story of Saunders’s first collection is a virtual reality theme park that simulates the United States during the Civil War era, the locale of the title story of the new collection is a museum in which two people pretend to be a caveman and woman for the entertainment and edification of the public. The protagonist caveman is paired up with a woman who does not perform her job with sufficient commitment; she often speaks English instead of inarticulate grunts, and she quarrels with her son who visits her on the job. Although the protagonist, who must fax reports to management about his fellow worker, tries to protect her, he is soon discovered and she is forced to leave. A new woman assigned to the cave is more scrupulous than he; the story ends with the reader suspicious that it will not be long before she has him replaced.
When asked in an interview why theme parks are often featured in his stories, Saunders said that they create a sort of cartoon-like mood that keeps him from becoming too earnest and serious, reminding him that he is not writing realist fiction and giving him permission to “goof off.” However, Saunders is not just “fooling around” in the story; as usual, he has a target, in this case the world of modern work in which bosses are distant anonymous entities with whom workers communicate by fax machines and who insist that they perform in accordance with the boss’s view of artificial reality. The couple in Saunders’s story, controlled by sophisticated technology, must make their living by pretending to be dumb and inarticulate—a metaphor, Saunders suggests, of how most Americans consider the role they play in the world of work.
However, the central image in Pastoralia is not the theme park, as it was in Saunders’s first collection; rather, the obsessive image here is the American male “loser” who cannot succeed in the real world and who must create a fantasy compensatory reality. The American loser’s creation of his own reality begins in childhood, suggests Saunders, with the shortest, and in many ways, the most heartrending story in the collection, “The End of FIRPO in the World,” in which a young overweight and disliked boy named Cody takes imaginative revenge on classmates and neighbors who torment him by putting boogers in their thermoses and plugging their water hoses to make them explode. FIRPO is the word Cody’s mother and her boyfriend use to refer to anything he does that they think is bad or dorky. During a bike ride, Cody imagines that his ultimate revenge will occur when he is famous for his splendid ideas, such as plugging up water hoses. The story ends with irony and pathos when he is hit by a car and the only person who has ever told him that he is “beautiful and loved” is the man who has hit him. The story succeeds by initially making the reader scorn Cody for the mean-spirited, vengeful acts he commits and the childish compensation fantasies he entertains, only to make the reader feel sorry for the boy when, with resignation, he accepts that he is the FIRPO his mother and her boyfriend say he is, even as the man who hit him futilely insists that God loves him and that he is beautiful in His sight.
In “The Barber’s Unhappiness” and “The Falls,” the Cody character has grown up; still fat and ineffective, he is also bald and single and lives with his mother—all sure Saunders signs of being a loser. The barber begins a fantasy sexual life with a pretty girl he sees at traffic school, creating a complete story about her, hoping she is a strict religious virgin who, once married to him, will let it all hang out. When he sees that she is a “big girl,” he is put off but soon is able, in his imagination, to “correct” her appearance. He dreams she slims down, developing a body like that of Daisy Mae in the Li’l Abner cartoon, kissing him in the way he has been waiting for his whole life.
The story sympathetically explores the fact that love is always a fantasy projection rather than a realistic evaluation of the other. As the barber walks to meet the girl for their first date, she looks the biggest he has ever seen her. However, he quickly corrects this assessment by imagining that if they were married, she would slim down with his help. He imagines an evening when she asks him to put away the report on how much his international chain of barbershops has earned and to join her in the bedroom so she can show him how grateful she is; she would stand there with her perfect face and Daisy Mae body, smiling at him with unconditional love. This ultimately tender story suggests that many people deal with their unhappiness by re-creating reality to their liking in their imagination; the injunction “be realistic” has no place in the world of George Saunders.
“The Falls” is perhaps the most ambiguous of the three Pastoralia stories in which loser-fantasists spend their time imagining an opportunity when they can prove their true worth. The story is a sort of duet of two men walking toward the falls of a river, the apex of the story’s narrative tension. Aldo Cummings is a writer who dreams of a time when T-shirts with his picture on them will be available at all the five-and-dime stores; Morse is a family man who feels that his childhood dreams were so bright that he cannot believe he is a nobody. The two men converge at the river in time to witness two young girls in a sinking canoe about to go over the falls. While Cummings stumbles away looking for help, Morse stands at the edge thinking the girls are already dead and that nobody could blame him for not diving in after them. However, even as he thinks this and makes a low sound of despair in his throat, he kicks off his loafers and throws “his long ugly body out across the water.” What Saunders establishes in all three of these stories about losers is the paradoxical fact that in reality, life is primarily fantasy. The reader accepts the fact that Morse’s dive into the water at the end is the ultimate quixotic act—foolish, hopeless, and brave—that both destroys and redeems him at once.
“Winky” is probably the most cogent example in the collection of Saunders’s combination of smart social satire and sometimes sentimental humanity. In this story of Neil Yaniky, a loser who resents caring for his handicapped sister, Saunders nails the modern world of self-help and creative selfishness seminars dead to rights. The inspirational speaker of the seminar Neil attends tells his eager listeners how to get rid of all the people who are ruining their lives by “crapping in their oatmeal.” Group members wear colored hats to identify in which stage they are—“Beginning to Begin” or “Moving Ahead in Beginning”—and are taught there is a “Time for Me to Win.” However, even as Yaniky is building himself up to throw his sister Winky out, the story shifts to her, preparing cookies, dressing to please, and thinking of him as the “all-time sweetie-pie,” insisting that girls are crazy to ignore him just because he is small and bald.
Counterpoint to this childlike inner monologue, Yaniky stalks home in a frenzy, arguing to himself that the world will not crap in his oatmeal and that his sister is a “real energy sink” who drags him down. The two counterpointed sections converge when he opens the door and Winky, acting as crazy as ever, meets him and bumps her head on the storm window. Yaniky sees the years stretch ahead of him bleak and joyless, and he wants to insult her, but he only goes to his room, “calling her terrible names under his breath.” The story suggests that to sacrifice the self for another does not have to be done with Christlike humility to be truly unselfish.
The most problematical story here—so absurdly pop-culture gothic it is not surprising that one of the judges who picked it for the 1999 O. Henry Award Prize Stories was Stephen King—is “Sea Oak.” The story focuses on a man who works at a male strip club called Joysticks and who lives with his Aunt Bernie, sister, and cousin in a subsidized apartment complex called Sea Oak, where there is no sea and no oak, only a rear view of Federal Express. Saunders evokes some funny bits here: the Board of Health that visits the club to make sure the men’s penises will not show, a television program of computer simulations of tragedies that never actually occurred but theoretically could. However, the story becomes most absurd when Bernie dies and returns from the grave as a zombie who urges the narrator to show his penis so he can make more money.
The ostensible satiric point of the story is Bernie’s expression of the unfulfilled longings of all the losers who die unheralded. However, what the reader most remembers is the grotesque image of Bernie’s ears, nose, arms, and legs decaying and falling off. If there is a central thematic line in the story, it occurs when the narrator puts what is left of Bernie’s body in a Hefty bag, thinking maybe there are angry dead people everywhere, hiding in rooms and bossing around their scared relatives. The story ends with Bernie’s voice in the narrator’s dreams crying the anthem of perhaps every pathetic, and somehow sympathetic, loser in Saunders’s collection—“Some People get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?”