Downsize this!

PASTORALIA

By George Saunders

Penguin Books, 188 pages

Available at Powerbook

Think you’ve got a crappy job? Just check out the plight of the unnamed cave dweller who plugs along in the title story of George Saunders’ Pastoralia, and you’ll be hugging your boss again in no time.

This morning I go to the Big Slot and find it goatless, Instead of a goat there’s a note:

Hold on, hold on, it says. The goat’s coming, for crissake. Don’t get all snooty.

The problem is, what am I supposed to do during the time when I’m supposed to be skinning the goat with the flint? I decide to pretend to be desperately ill. I rock in a corner and moan. This gets old. Skinning the goat with the flint takes the better part of an hour. No way am I rocking and moaning for an hour.

Janet comes in from her Separate Area and her eyebrows go up.

"No freaking goat?" she says.

I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away in high hills, and as my fear was great, I did not follow.

Janet scratches under her armpit and makes a sound like a monkey, then lights a cigarette.

I gesture to her to put out the cigarette and make the fire. She gestures to me to kiss her butt.

"Why am I making a fire?" she says. "A fire in advance of a goat. Is this like a wishful fire? Like a hopeful fire? No, sorry, I’ve had it."

I scowl at her and shake my head.

"Well, did you at least check the Little Slot?" she says. "Maybe it was a small goat and they really crammed it in. Maybe for once they gave us a nice quail or something."

I give her a look, then walk off in a rolling gait to check the Little Slot.

Nothing.

Saunders is a satirist. His turf is the absurdity of the human condition. But he’s also got big chunks of Charlie Kaufman and Franz Kafka DNA inside him as well. His hapless working-class denizens toil away as male strippers, barbers, motivational speakers, and – in the case of the title story – as professional "cave persons" in a prehistoric theme park.

And you think you’ve got problems.

What Saunders captures so well is a society on the verge of economic collapse – or at least one whose workforce lives in fear of being downsized, which makes them endure their terrible jobs all the more. Think of those dweebs on The Office or in Dilbert or Doug Coupland’s books. Now imagine a surreal spin – a Twilight Zone wand transforming those horrendous day jobs into inescapable eternity. There is something hellish in Saunders’ tone – the kind of hell Sartre or Beckett rendered so well in their plays.

The unnamed caveman and his workmate Janet go through their paces in "Pastoralia," waiting eternally for the daily goat to make an appearance. It is both their sustenance and their prop, the item they need to demonstrate to theme park visitors – who are less and less plentiful these days – what real cave people did on an average, ordinary day. Speaking in anything except grunts, smoking cigarettes and stepping "out of character" is strictly forbidden – a situation that puts the narrator in a precarious position: does he cover his own butt by faxing in negative "Daily Partner Performance Evaluation Forms" on his teammate? Or does he try to do the human thing and indulge Janet’s many moods and personality defects?

Hey, it’s a situation familiar to many modern-day office workers. Teamwork is a bitch.

Above it all in Saunders’ world is a glib, slightly out-of-touch management voice – the kind that always ends up with a golden parachute and yet sends condescending memos laced with job threats to its workers. "Times are hard," the memos read. "Entire Units are being eliminated as the Staff Remixing continues." At the same time, the memos deny anything troubling is going on:

Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing. Please be advised that they are false. They are so false that we considered not even bothering to deny them. Because denying them would imply that we have actually heard them. Which we haven’t. We don’t waste our time on such nonsense. And yet we know that if we don’t deny the rumors we haven’t heard, you will assume they are true. And they are so false! So let us categorically state that all the rumors you’ve been hearing are false. Not only the rumors you’ve heard, but also those you haven’t heard, and even those that haven’t yet been spread, are false. However, there is one exception to this, and that is if the rumor is true. That is, if the rumor presents us, us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you’ve been hearing is right on target.

Saunders’ book came out in 2000, but it seems to prophesy a time of high paranoia in America – namely, the George W. Bush years.

Reading Pastoralia, you kind of wish the Bush administration had this kind of ruthless self-policing going on within its own ranks. Certainly, some incompetent heads should be rolling in a White House that has had nothing but goofs, gaffes, missteps and accidental shootings since 2001. But for some odd reason, Bush and his crewmates continue to toe the line, never breaking the unspoken strictures of management – that you don’t tell tales out of school, and you never implicate your own. And thus you can’t help reading Pastoralia not only as satire, but as a kind of business self-help guide, and maybe even as a political lesson.