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.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

All his life--he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always too wary of too much enthusiasm--all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them. He had to be careful about saying what he really believed--that there must be something like intuition in a first-rate mathematician's mind, some lightning flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.

When he finally brought himself to say all this to Sophia, he also said that there were those who would bridle at the very word, "poet," in connection with mathematical science. And others, he said, who would leap at the notion all too readily, to defend a muddle and laxity in their own thinking.

With all respect to Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro is the best to ever do it. She gets called "our Chekhov"--the Chekhov of the English language--with some regularity, but I don't think even Chekhov, as much a playwright as a short story writer, even approached the short story with the ferocity and genius that Alice Munro does. It's a gift, I think, to be living in the era of Alice, even if she has given up the writing of stories in her old age.

But all of that makes the title story of the collection Too Much Happiness, the most self-consciously Chekhovian thing Munro has ever written, all the more interesting. "Too Much Happiness" is the real-life story of Sophia Kovalevsky, the Russian mathematician who was, before Marie Curie, perhaps the best known female scientist in Europe. It's story that's strange for Munro in several ways: first, because it's a fictionalized rendition of a true story, second, because it's set in the nineteenth century, and third, because it's set in Europe, rather than Canada. And yet Kovalevsky's story resounds with the themes that Munro takes up all the time: the dignity of common lives, the transformative power of illness, the persistent oppression and marginalization of women.

Sophia is a brilliant mathematician who soon overtakes her own tutor, the German Weierstrass, and the story opens as she receives Europe's most prestigious mathematics prize, but she still requires the string-pulling of her male benefactors to get a job offer, and even then only in frigid Sweden, which she hates. Sophia's life has touched upon great things: her brother-in-law was a leader of the Paris Commune, and her sister gave her life to be attached to his kind of adventuresome bravado. And yet Sophia herself finds herself drawn not to a man like Jaclard but the spinster sisters of her tutor Weierstrass, who toil, not unhappily, to make the home in which his great work is done. She seesaws between the feverishness of her mathematical work and a deep satisfaction in a life of domestic and social pleasures; in the present of the story she is anticipating a happy marriage to another clever and larger-than-life Russian. "She was learning," Munro writes, "quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood--that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It  could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone." Yet neither Weierstrass, nor Jaclard, nor her fiance Maksim, nor her friend the mathematician Poincare, seem to think of such lives as opposed to one another.

The other stories are more standard Munrovian fare, and a few of them are among her best work. Especially powerful are those which are concerned with shocking violence, which, despite the domestic surface of Munro's stories, is something that lurks not far below the surface. In "Free Radicals," a sickly widow is briefly trapped in her home by a stranger who confesses that he has just murdered his family, including his mentally disabled sister, who he considered a drain on his own independence. This story finds frightening echoes in "Child's Play," one of the darkest stories Munro has ever written, about (spoiler alert) a woman who, as a child, and with an accomplice she has only recently met at summer camp, drowns another mentally disabled child. This act of momentary compulsion has transformed the life of the narrator, who has become an academic studying cultural ideas about mental disability, but who seems unable to deal with her own deed in any direct way. As disturbing as "Free Radicals" is, it's "Child's Play" that takes the darker route, as if putting us in the viewpoint not of the trapped widow but the killer. Once inside that head we are shocked to find no sadist, but only a very normal person, driven to a horrible act by the most recognizable of feelings: disgust, shame, and a need to be liked.

The story I think will stick with me most, though, is the opener "Dimensions," about a woman whose husband kills their three children. The husband, remanded by the court to a mental hospital, writes to the narrator, explaining that he has seen their children in another dimension, a place where they still exist, and the narrator, despite herself, finds this to be comforting. The rambling and esoteric voice of the letters the husband writes to the narrator have a kind of voice you might never know Munro was capable of writing, and captures something true about our willingness to step outside the bounds of logic and reasoning--with no contempt for those who must--in order to face the most difficult truths in life. And though there's no real violence to it, I loved the undercurrent of masculine viciousness in "Wenlock Edge," about a college student whose roommate convinces her to have dinner with her--I don't know what to call it but a sugar daddy--who instructs her to take off her clothes. Though she complies out of compulsive fascination, the narrator expects to be assaulted, only to be given a pleasant meal and a conversation about Greek philosophy.

Even one of the weaker stories, "Deep-Holes," provides a key to understanding Munro's stories: while hiking with his family, a boy falls into a deep glaciated hole and breaks both his legs. He grows up to be a kind of sour hippie who cuts ties with his mother, except when he wants money for his commune, and we are left to wonder whether this has something to do with the experience of falling into the hole as a child. Munro would never be so crude as to suggest that there's a causal line between the two--more likely they are both representations of the character's contemptuousness for boundaries and carefulness--but the image of the deep hole, lurking under the brush of life, ready to swallow you and break your bones, is one that rings true.