Pastoralia

Pastoralia Review

The title novella of Pastoralia is set inside a cave-people theme park — a facility where employees are required to live as prehistoric humans, communicate only in grunts, eat what is provided through a fax machine (goat, periodically), and file daily reports on each other’s compliance with the theme. The narrator and his colleague Janet have been doing this for months. Janet is cracking — she has been speaking English, having conversations with visitors, violating the terms of her employment with increasing frequency. The narrator writes his reports carefully, noting her violations in language that is simultaneously bureaucratic and tender, trying to preserve their working relationship while meeting his institutional obligations. He has a sick mother, a child he doesn’t see often enough, financial fears that concentrate the mind wonderfully on the question of job retention.

Saunders’s third book, and his most sustained examination of what institutional pressure does to human beings over time, proceeds from a premise that is absurdist in the manner of Kafka: the specific absurdity of having to perform a role so completely that you cannot be yourself, and the specific horror of being required to surveil and potentially denounce the person performing the adjacent role. The daily report is the collection’s central image — a form of compulsory mutual surveillance that is simultaneously mundane (it’s just paperwork) and totalitarian (it structures every interaction).

“Sea Oak,” the collection’s most celebrated story, follows a family living in a failing development called Sea Oak: the narrator, his two sisters, his cousin, and Aunt Bernie, who works at Denny’s and is the family’s moral centre. Bernie dies. She comes back from the dead, dug out of the grave and angry for the first time in her life, demanding that the family members — who have been drifting through their lives with the particular passivity of people for whom ambition has never seemed possible — actually do something with themselves. The story is very funny and genuinely disturbing, and its horror is inseparable from its compassion: what Bernie demands from beyond the grave is so reasonable, so clearly right, that the horror is that she had to die to say it.

“The Falls” closes the collection with its most formally restrained piece — two men walking toward the same moment, their interior monologues revealing character with the compressed efficiency of a story that knows exactly where it is going. Pastoralia is the Saunders collection that has the least shelter from the darkness it is examining. It is also, as a result, the one that most directly confronts the economic conditions that make the darkness possible — the fear that sits at the base of every story, the fear of losing the degrading job that is the only thing between your family and catastrophe.