A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

When our daughters were small, I'd sometimes dump a bunch of building toys on the floor (Legos and wooden blocks and parts of other sets) and we'd sit there for hours, listening to music and talking and absentmindedly making something. There was no plan; we were just putting this with that, because we liked the way it looked. But pretty soon, a structure would start to appear. The ramps were leading to that platform, and there was a cool little space under that platform, an excellent place for that plastic dragon and Lego plumber to live. The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had "meaning," but it wasn't a meaning we'd intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange or anticipated the exact effect it would have on us later when, having forgotten we'd made it, we walked past it. That is, the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain combines several short works by Russian masters--Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol--with short essays explaining how and why Saunders thinks the story works the way it does. These pieces come out of a class that Saunders teaches on the Russian short story, and while the class might not be a workshop class in the truest sense, it's clear that what Saunders really cares about is thinking of these stories as a writer, someone who wants to imitate their graces and surprises effectively. I think sometimes that anyone can think about a piece of fiction as a reader, but if you start thinking about it as a writer you'll find that you see much more--and for better or worse, you can never really stop. So whether the class is a writing workshop or not, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is a book for writers.

First things first: one has to admit that the stories Saunders has chosen are really good. There's no surprise there, I guess. But it's been a while since I've visited the Russian short story--which I also took a class on in college--and I really was delighted by these stories, which are so different from one another, but which have a kind of earthy, earnest pre-Revolution "Russianness" that is unmistakable. One of them, "The Nose" by Gogol, will be familiar to many, as it was to me, but it's still a highlight, a funny absurd story of a man chasing his own nose around town that shouldn't work, but it does. (Saunders describes the story as functioning with a kind of audaciousness, making the absurdity work by pointedly illustrating that it shouldn't work, thereby getting a little grace from a skeptical reader.) But I had never read, for instance, Chekhov's "The Darling," about a woman who gives her whole self to a series of lovers, or Tolstoy's simple morality tale "Alyosha the Pot." (There are more stories by Chekhov here than any other, and I think that's no accident--he really was the genius of the short story.)

One thing that struck me as being rather funny is how straightforward the writing advice here is. Though Saunders is often associated with a kind of topical futurism and social critique, when it comes to teaching writing, he has a kind of old-fashioned fuddy-duddiness, which, if I'm honest, I think as a teacher I share. He takes seriously, for instance, the idea that a story should contain something like "rising action"--a phrase that might make a postmodern bristle. One specific point he makes that I really appreciate, and has made me think about my own writing, is that a good story needs to "always be escalating," and while I don't know if that's true, I do think that it will often explain why an otherwise well-written story seems not to work. I appreciated, too, his thoughts on how "The Gooseberries" and "Alyosha the Pot" succeed by a kind of thoughtful reticence, whether neither Chekhov nor Tolstoy puts too heavy a hand on the moral questions at the heart of the story. That is, I think, easier said than done, and one must admit that to be a writer like Chekhov or Tolstoy you have to have a kind of genius insight into the nature of human beings at baseline that few possess. Nonetheless, for us ordinary Iosips, there's a lot here worth pondering.