Pastoralia by George Saunders

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This is a series of short stories which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. They full of hilarious inner dialogues of a series of flawed and down and out characters.

The first is about a man who is working in a historic reentactment park as a caveman. He has a daily routine of coming out of his private apartment into his display enclosure. He (usually) finds a dead goat awaiting him and as part of his caveman role, he skins the goat with his flint tool while is cavewoman partner stats a fire to cook it. This is the only real food they get throughout the day. But as the attendance to the park lessens, he occasionally finds no goat awaiting him and they have to dip into the reserve crackers. Because there are no visitors on some days, his cavewoman partner often breaks her character and gossips with friend on her cell phone or speaks English to him which is strictly against the park rules. He grunts his displeasure back at her, but when he fills out the daily partner evaluation forms he always gives her good marks because he likes her as a person. When rumors start circulating of cutbacks at the park, his supervisor has a meeting with him and earnestly begs him to be more forthcoming in his partner evaluations because the supervisor is aware of his partner's shortcomings but need the partner evaluations to cover his own butt if he fires her. The whole story is told in this deadpan tone and illustrated the silliness of many of our day to day situations at work.

The second story is called "Winky" and the main character is attending a seminar where attendess are told they need to face up to the people who are making their lives difficult by "crapping in their oatmeal". The main character realizes that the person "crapping in his oatmeal" is his sister with whom he lives. Throughout the seminar the character works up the nerve to confront his sister but then chickens out when she greets him when he gets back home. Another story includes a guy who is a male stripper who is close to losing his job until his aunt dies then claws her way back out of the grave and shows up back at home and begins ordering everyone around as she now has powers and she puts together a plan to force the family to claw its way out of poverty all while her body is slowly falling apart and decomposing. The plan involves forbidden acts at the strip club and forcing the sisters to go to work.

Another story featured a middle aged barber who lives with his mother and is lonely. He spends his days daydreaming about the sexual conquest of various women he shes and fantasizes about. He meets a girl when he is forced to attend driving school after a speeding ticket. He becomes infatuated with her beautiful face but then his bubble is burst when he realizes she is a "big" girl.

All of these stories are told in this deadpan tone and the characters take themselves too seriously while comically trying to appear more than they are. There is quite a bit of off color language, so the book is definitely not for everyone, but it is laugh out loud funny in parts.