Hapless Heroes

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 (Riverhead Books; 188 pages; $22.95) 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.

--By Paul Gray