If you thought George Saunders would follow up his freaky and twisted book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline with some ambitious departure, you were wrong -- he doesn't need to. Saunders' fascination with amusement parks stares you in the face again as you open his second collection. "Pastoralia," the lead story, is a 66-pager about a man and woman posing as cave people in an amusement park. As the pair become tense about their job security (not many guests have "poked their head in" to watch them lately) and their families in the outside world (with whom they correspond via fax machine, from the "Separate Areas" in their cave), they find their daily supply of goat meat dwindling, as well as fellow "actors" losing jobs around the park. Pastoralia picks up right where CivilWarLand left off.

The stories that follow, though, find Saunders expanding his scope to include a self-help guru, a horny barber, and daydreaming businessmen (featured in the closing story, "The Falls," which suffers a bit from a Nicholson Baker-like style). The book's highlight is "Sea Oak," where two oblivious sisters study for their GEDs while caring for their babies and watching TV shows like How My Child Died Violently. Their brother is a stripper at Joysticks. When their prudish aunt dies and then resurrects to give the siblings advice, she tells the brother to show his penis for extra money.

Magnifying the dreams of people in these kinds of settings is what Saunders does best. Somehow he creates lackadaisical characters and makes us care for them while simultaneously laughing at them. As a reader, it's an odd position to find yourself in, and Saunders does it to you precisely and frequently. He's merciless and brilliant, and most admirably, he doesn't seem to mind if he offends you sometimes. Although he's compared to folks like Garrison Keillor and Kurt Vonnegut, you get the feeling Saunders would smear their faces in cream pies if he had to, and then help them wash their faces. He's a meanie with a heart of gold. KEVIN SAMPSELL

Saunders reads on Mon May 15, 7:30 pm, at Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6400, free with advance tickets.

VALENCIA
by Michelle Tea
(Seal Press) $13

Somewhere in San Francisco there must be one street corner that doesn't reverberate lost romance, broken families, or abused prostitutes to Michelle Tea; but if so, it's one irrelevant street corner. Setting is so intertwined with Tea's fiction as to play the dominant character, and San Francisco is the perfect partner to the narrator's simultaneously bleak and romantic viewpoint.

In Valencia, a sort-of successor to Tea's debut, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, the narrator ("Michelle") continues her vague search for fulfillment via girl romance, hitchhiking, and odd jobs, including a brief return to prostitution. While the storyline sounds like stock Beat stuff, Tea manages to transcend macho self-interest in Valencia, acknowledging her fucked-upness with wry thematic mockery (in one scene, after trying valiantly to quit drinking coffee for a girlfriend, Michelle breaks down crying in the midst of Noe Valley).

Tea's fiction is beautifully similar to real life -- a glimpse into a bad girl's diary -- full of misguided intelligence, complicated sex, and the impossibility, even the undesirability, of redemption. TRACI VOGEL

LOST AND FOUND

BLUE BOY
by Jean Giono
(Counterpoint Press, orig. pub. 1932)

The bell curve is a wonderfully potent tool in the critic's Swiss army knife. In the realm of literature, for instance, it neatly cleaves novels into three distinct categories: wastebasket, mediocre, and masterpiece. Jean Giono's Blue Boy falls squarely onto mediocre ground.

Giono's eponymous blue boy lives in a rustic village in Provence, France in the early 1900s. The reader spends a lot of time going through the throes of early adolescence with him, which has all the throat-clearing tediousness of thumbing through the embarrassing pictures of someone else's photo album. Fortunately, the narrative is cut enough with soaring poetic descriptions of the boy's village to resurrect the book into the realm of interesting reading. The village is a place that lives and breathes. Every action of every peasant is married not just to survival, but to their culture of bread, wine, meat, music, and craftsmanship. Giono excels at describing this unique joie de vivre, and it makes even the most hardened city-slicker yearn for a simpler time.

Ultimately, though, a novel can't succeed on poetry alone, and Blue Boy bogs down in swooning imagery, countless analogies, and lack of a coherent plot. In 1932, poetic muscle may have been enough to buoy a book as provincially French as this one, but now it definitely falls into the realm of mediocre curiosity; something for the Francophile, but that's about all. MARK PINKOS