I should have known from the interview in The Believer Book of Writers Interviewing Writers, where I first encountered George Saunders, that I’d have mixed feelings about his fiction. Reading the interview with Ben Marcus (whose The Father Costume, the only book of his I’ve read, is a beautiful, if surreal and enigmatic, tale—and a beautiful object to hold as well, with images by Matthew Ritchie), is like eavesdropping on a conversation between two aesthetes suffering from Tourette’s syndrome; brilliance punctuated by clowning. (I don’t know where the clowning came from—Ben Marcus, I suspect, who in his introduction to the interview wrote, “The following conversation took place on an old Toshiba calculator.”) It’s a dizzying combination of too-clever banter and scintillating writerly pronouncements, such as:
All good fiction is moral, in that it is imbued with the world, and powered by our real concerns: love, death, how-should-I-live.
And this:
Ideally, I aspire to write stuff that takes into account the fact that we are all dying. So there’s no time to be bloatedly intellectual, no time to be merely clever, no time to be stupid, or programmatic, or cloying.
Saunders’s first book is Civilwarland in Bad Decline, but I chose his second collection of stories, Pastoralia, as my point of entry. The first few pages of the title story, a kind of wage slave’s Waiting for Godot set in the caveman exhibit at a theme park, went down easily enough, but then I became restless. It’s like a bad joke that goes on for 66 pages. The second story, “Winky,” an estian (as in Erhard Seminar Training) parody of personal growth seminars, is ridiculous and sad, but mercifully short. But “Sea Oak,” the story of a male stripper living in a housing project with his bickering sister and cousin, their two kids, and his peacemaking Aunt Beanie—who returns from the grave to berate them into hustling up the cash she needs to live the life she never lived (“…I’m going to get my nipples hard standing in the breeze from the ocean, eating shrimp from a cup, you sons of bitches, while my lover watches me from the veranda…”)—has its moments and is entertaining enough.
These first three stories are satirical, comic like cartoons, brimming with thinly disguised social commentary, mocking consumerism and capitalism. This explains, more than anything, my restlessness reading them; I find stories like these wearisome rather than revelatory. But the last three stories, while stylistically faithful to rest of the book, have more heart in them than the first three, are more poignant than parodic. These three tales tell the stories of people who, like Thurber’s Walter Mitty, imagine themselves as something better, something more, and their daydreams lead them ineluctably to their manifold destinies.
In “The End of FIRPO in the World,” young Cody imagines himself doing something that everyone will have to concede is not FIRPO, “being the word Daryl [his Mom’s boyfriend] used to describe anything he, Cody, did that was bad or dorky.” Mickey, the toeless barber in “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” fantasizes about women like “the black girl in the silver bikini riding her horse through that tidal pool in slow motion on 1-900-DREMGAL,” but he may have met the real girl of his dreams at Driving School. When two redheaded girls in an oarless green canoe sail by on their way to “The Falls,” Morse (an insecure Everyman) and Cummings (a nearly forty literary wannabe who still lives with his mother) are snapped out of their respective reveries; one will make a desperate, fateful decision and leave Walter Mitty behind. This last story left a satisfying lump in my throat.
At his best, Saunders writes dimensional, bittersweet, emotionally-tuned prose, like this passage from “The Falls”:
When he got home, he would sit on the steps and enjoy a few minutes of centered breathing while reciting his mantra, which was Calm Down Calm Down, before the kids came running out and grabbed his legs and sometimes even bit him quite hard in their excitement and Ruth came out to remind him in an angry tone that he wasn’t the only one who’d worked all day, and as he walked he gazed out at the beautiful Taganac in an effort to absorb something of its serenity but instead found himself obsessing about the faulty latch on the gate, which theoretically could allow Annie to toddle out of the yard and into the river, and he pictured himself weeping on the shore, and to eradicate this thought started manically whistling “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” while slapping his hands against his sides.
For my money, Pastoralia is a mixed bag, but I’m glad I didn’t abandon it after page 88. Saunders has an ear for the demotic and his voice is unique, but sometimes I wish he wrote more seriously—as he seems to take his subjects—and less satirically.
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