My second George Saunders book this year, I bought this one based on how much I liked CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Pastoralia is similar - a collection of short stories, all about sad sacks trying to survive in a world that has it in for them, a world where things go from terrible to even worse that you could have imagined. In the first story, a man with a very sick boy has a job as a caveman in a history theme park, but his desire to do a good job is thwarted by his partner's tendency to speak English and act uncave-like when visitors come by. The best one in the collection is Sea Oak, about a male stripper trying to support his extended family by working in a nautical-themed club. His grandmother dies during a break-in at their squalid apartment complex, but the cheap coffin they buried her in can't hold her and she comes back to tell them to start improving their lot and not wasting their life. Her advice crumbles along with her corpse, leaving the narrator in the same place as when he started, except this time haunted by the bleak future before him.
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