Book Report: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

5. George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2020) (1/23/21)

Let me say to start off, I just love George Saunders. He's funny, wise, imaginative, generous--and a damn good writer. He's also a good reader. 

This book is a sort of sampling of a lecture course he has taught for twenty years at Syracuse University on the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation, featuring seven stories: three by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy, and one each by Ivan Turgenyev and Nikolai Gogol--winnowed down from some thirty that he treats in the classroom. As he puts it in the introduction,

We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts. We're about to spend some time in a realm where it is assumed that, as the great (twentieth-century) Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made of a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art--namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?
     (You know, those cheerful, Russian kinds of big questions.)
     . . . The basic drill I'm proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you've just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trooper of a reader) felt it, it's valid. If it confounded you, that's worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off, valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of "theme" or "plot" or "character development" or any of that.
     . . . The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

Saunders walks us through each story--the first one, Chekhov's "In the Cart," page by page in fact--talking about just those questions, often couched in terms of technique: how did the writer get us to feel what we might have felt? He looks at what makes a reader keep reading; at what constitutes the "heart" of a story; at the effect of pattern within a story; the interplay of straight factual exposition and interiority; strangeness as a door to truth; how quiet contradiction (in life, in literature) can enhance meaning; and the power of omission. 

And I confess, I needed his hand-holding for these stories to come to have bigger meaning for me. I "got" something from an uninformed reading, of course, but I got so much more from Saunders's wise, interrogative explication. Could I carry on and read other stories by these authors, and maybe get a bit more from them than if I hadn't read this book? I think so. If only to ask the very simple question, "What is the writer trying to convey, and how is he doing it?" A simple enough question, even if the answer usually is not. 

My book is bristling with flags, and I took pages of notes, such as: TICHN (Things I Couldn't Help Noticing); Be specific! Honor Efficiency (REP: Ruthless Efficiency Principles)! Always be escalating! Focus on increasing causality! (not "and then," but "and so")!; follow the voice. Et cetera.

Here are a couple of representative nuggets:

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It's nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it's doing what it was made to do.

*

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.
     That's it.
     What is the exact flavor of the thrill? The writer doesn't have to know. That's what he's writing to find out.
     How is the thrill accomplished?
     To use an archery metaphor (and how often does a person get to do that?), one way to produce the thrill is to stop aiming at the target and concentrate on the feeling of the arrow leaving the bow. In this alternate version of archery, the arrow then sails off in a certain direction and keeps adjusting course, and where it lands . . . that's the target.

I could go on quoting, but instead I'll link to an essay that Saunders wrote a few years back (some of which appears in this book), "What Writers Really Do When They Write." It's a fair representation of his breadth and humor as both a writer and a teacher. And I'll end as I began: I just love George Saunders!