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.

The Cave-People as Corporate Metaphor

The cave-people theme park is Saunders’s most precisely developed corporate metaphor because its logic extends to every element of the characters’ situation. The employees must perform prehistoric humanity — grunting rather than speaking, eating what the fax machine provides, maintaining the illusion for visitors — not as a discrete performance but as a continuous condition. They cannot drop the performance when visitors leave because someone might be watching. They cannot speak to each other in English because the rules prohibit it. They must maintain the cave-person life even as their actual problems — sick mothers, absent children, financial fears — are entirely contemporary.

The condition of continuous performance under surveillance is rendered through the daily report structure. Each employee is required to submit a daily assessment of their partner’s compliance with the cave-person protocols. This means that every interaction between the narrator and Janet is simultaneously a human interaction and a potential piece of institutional evidence. The surveillance is not external — it is embedded in the relationship between the two characters, which is both the satirical conceit and the story’s emotional horror.

Janet as a Study in Breaking

The narrator’s colleague Janet is one of Saunders’s most carefully developed supporting characters. She is not a villain or a fool — she is a person under institutional pressure who is running out of the capacity to maintain the performance the institution requires. Her violations of the protocols — speaking English, communicating with visitors, failing to eat the goat — are not acts of rebellion but symptoms of deterioration. She cannot sustain the performance anymore, and the narrator can see this happening while being institutionally required to document it.

The narrator’s dilemma — how to write the reports honestly while preserving his relationship with Janet and his own sense of himself as a decent person — is the story’s moral center. He finds, eventually, that these requirements cannot all be met simultaneously, and that the institution will determine which requirement wins.

”Sea Oak” and the Demands of the Dead

“Sea Oak” is among the funniest and most disturbing stories in American literature, and the combination is precisely calibrated. Aunt Bernie — the family’s quiet, uncomplaining moral center who works at Denny’s and never asks for anything — dies, is buried, and returns from the dead filled with the anger she was never permitted to express in life. Her demands are reasonable: she wants the family members to stop drifting, to take control of their lives, to actually do something with the time they have. The horror is that she had to die to say this. The humor is the specific, practical nature of her demands, rendered in the idiom of someone who spent a lifetime asking for nothing.

The story works because Bernie’s return from the dead is not supernatural horror but corrective justice. The death that took her before she could demand what she deserved is itself the horror; the return is the comedy of the situation finally being acknowledged.

Economic Anxiety as Subject

Pastoralia is Saunders’s most economically specific collection. The fear that sits beneath every story — the fear of losing the degrading job that is the only thing preventing a specific kind of catastrophe — is rendered with documentary precision rather than abstract sympathy. These are not workers experiencing the alienation of capital in a theoretical sense; they are people who cannot afford to lose work they find demeaning, who know exactly how much they are paid and exactly how much they need, whose ability to care for the people they love depends on their continued performance inside systems that do not care about them.

This precision is what prevents the collection’s darkness from becoming nihilism. The characters’ circumstances are hopeless in specific, comprehensible ways that demand a specific kind of sympathy rather than a general one.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Saunders’s darkest and most economically precise collection, examining what institutional pressure does to human beings with documentary specificity and genuine moral feeling.