Theme-Park Theodicies
Nate Barksdale
April 1, 2001
Pastoralia: Stories, George Saunders (RiverHead Books, 2000),
188 pp., $22.95. So the pitch for the story goes something like this: a young man, the product of a working-class Chicago neighborhood, educated as a petroleum engineer at the Colorado School of Mines, starts writing at his computer terminal on the sly short stories about sad people with hilariously bad jobs, and then out of relative nowhere gets published by the New Yorker. His first collection of stories (1997's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline) brings him acclaim throughout the literary parallel-universe as a new and astounding voice, which has seemingly burst fully formed from the head of Zeus. In a literary market that rewards innovative—but not too innovative—work, George Saunders (whose second collection, Pastoralia, was published last year) seems a comfortable anomaly, a Raymond Carver come back from the dead in the guise of cartoonist Scott Adams, consistently delivering a taut, corporatized brand of magical realism. But Dilbert this ain't. Beneath Saunders's fresh and brilliant humor is an impressive compassion for the afflicted, coupled with an earnest moral critique of millennial American culture in all its glimmer and gore. But first a bit about the setup. In "Sea Oak," the third story in Pastoralia, a television blares a show called The Worst That Could Happen: "A half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher." The show is a good proxy for most ...
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