Six stories, and the title one has a man and a woman playing cave people in a theme park exhibit, required to grunt at visitors, receiving a daily goat, and filing performance reports on each other. That’s the register throughout: Ordinary Americans trapped in absurd employment, trying very hard to be decent inside systems designed to make that impossible. A male stripper living with his grandmother. A self-help seminar. A barber who fantasizes constantly and can’t speak. Saunders writes corporate language better than anyone alive and the funniest sentences here are the saddest ones.
Pastoralia