NetGalley ARC – 5 stars
Review published in Calliope on the Web, journal of Mensa’s writers’ special interest group, April 2021.
George Saunders, author of prize-winning story collections as well as the Man Booker Prize novel Lincoln in the Bardo, is a professor at Syracuse University where he teaches a class in 19th century Russian short stories – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Gorky. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain grew out of this course, and now it’s your chance to sit in, read the stories, and follow Saunders’s commentary, questions, and multiple “Afterthoughts.” You’re also offered a chance to try your hand at some exercises: cutting, escalating, evaluating translations (even if you speak not a word of Russian). It’s a friendly, cheerful, breezy tour through some iconic literature you may have not felt up to tackling, and if you love Russian literature already, this will enlighten and entertain you.
He starts out gently: doling out Chekhov’s “In the Cart” in two-page doses, asking questions along the way: What did you notice? What did it make you think of? Why do you think he put that in there? By the end, a simple little story of an errand into town has become a microcosm of an ordinary woman’s whole life. Subsequent stories are poured out in full measure, followed by Saunders’s musings, observations, and always, always questions. He offers not just explications of the stories themselves but of the writing process: how did these writers come up with these ideas, these images, these plots, and why might they have arranged these sentences the way they did? The course is geared toward aspiring writers, who are a very select bunch from a large pool of applicants, so these “technical” issues are key to the discussions, as illustrated by these masters. But it’s George Saunders: he’s funny, he’s irreverent, he demystifies: “We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response (instantaneously) by intuition. That’s it. Over and over.” Or: “You don’t need an idea to start a story, you just need a sentence.” Of course it’s not that simple. I seriously doubt that when Chekhov sat down to write “The Darling” he just scribbled out a sentence and kept going. If we can see the developing pattern, surely Chekhov could too – he was too damn good and knew his tools too well not to. But Saunders is also big on revision: that first sentence can always be better, tighter, more vivid – and most of all, it needs to cause something, to go somewhere: “Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it.” He observes: “Many young writers start out with the idea that a story is a place to express their views… they understand the story as a delivery system for their ideas… but, as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well.” In the end, he asserts, what fiction does is to “[cause] an incremental change in the state of a mind… that’s it… that change is finite but real. And that’s not nothing. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.”
And if you don’t always agree with his approach, he’s fine with that. After I finished grumbling a little about a few of his pronouncements, I forgave him instantly for this: “That feeling of disagreeing with me was your artistic will asserting itself.” A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a delightful opportunity to explore seven terrific stories (well, maybe six… I never will “get” Gogol), and have your writing mind juiced along the way by a most pleasant and excellent guide.