A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading and life) is, simply, marvellous. George Saunders is already an acclaimed short story writer, and his only novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Booker Prize. This book shows he is also plainly an outstanding teacher. It is essentially a series of reflections based on the classes he has run for 20 years at Syracuse University on the Russian short story in translation, and they are unmissable.
Saunders looks at seven short stories he has often taught and knows extremely well (and boy, does he really know them). His analyses are based on deep experience and an extreme level of attentiveness. He notices a lot. There are three stories by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy and one each by Turgenev and Gogol. Saunders has taught these personal favourites for many years, and is superbly adept at guiding us through them, alerting us to their flows and eddies, particularly through skilful questioning.
Perhaps his key word is ‘escalation’, and he is brilliantly perceptive in showing those micro-moments when a story ‘escalates’, moves forward, in some way, especially if this is not obvious. There are two other key ‘e’ words: efficiency and expectation. Stories need to be ruthlessly efficient, never including anything extraneous (there you go again) to their purposes, and they need to deal with a Goldilocks level of expectation: when imagining what comes next in Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’, what developments would disappoint us as being too obvious, or too absurd? The story needs just the right level of expectation-fulfilment:
Chekhov’s challenge is to use these expectations he’s created but not too neatly.
That opening analysis is called by Saunders ‘A Page at A Time’, because he breaks up the story in such a way, slowing it down drastically and attending it to intensely in short chunks by handing his students just one page to consider before moving on. This is of course not natural, and he admits it might be irritating, but he only does it once as an exemplar, and when you get to the second story, Turgenev’s ‘The Singers’, you find yourself hyper-alert to the way that piece moves, almost nervous as if Saunders is going to pop up in your head and ask you exactly what you have noticed?
As Saunders writes, stories always need to advance in non-trivial ways, and the book is a ‘masterclass’ in seeing these. This noticing, a level of concentrated attention, is what the book trains you to improve in yourself. Saunders is generous and far from didactic: you can find your own way through a story, and notice what you like, and this indeed is what you have to do. His attention to detail, his determination to take nothing for granted, nothing unexamined, makes me think of Elizabeth Bishop and her restless revisions, confirmations and questionings. He calls Chekhov’s stories splendid, brief, reconsideration machines - a perfect description also of Bishop’s poems like ‘The Fish’ or ‘The Bight’.
I’ve written here about the exercise ‘A Page at A Time’ that Saunders suggests for Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’: I can confirm it works in class (it’s a story that is simultaneously simple and complex). One of his suggestions which you can try out in the Hemingway is to ask ‘is this a story yet?’ after sections. He shows this perfectly at the end of the Chekhov, when it finally truly becomes a story.
Some other questions and comments throughout the book:
When does an anecdote become a story?
Edit down a piece of prose: at what point are you damaging rather than improving it?
The kind of intuitive, line-by-line attention to editing we’ve been talking about - that’s what makes it more likely that what happens in there will be thrilling and non-trivial, that whatever happens in there will happen more crisply and definitively.
We’re always rationally and explaining things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate … What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we ‘know’ something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple.
Every story here is packed with interest (Saunders does not claim they are all perfect; indeed, their imperfections make them all the more interesting). Very different to Chekhov are Tolstoy (represented by ‘Alyosha the Pot’ and his magisterial ‘Master and Man’, the longest piece in the book), and Gogol, whose bizarre ‘The Nose’ is brilliantly explained as an example from the Russian skaz tradition (Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully).
Finally,
Reading a story like ‘Gooseberries’ … reminds us that any question in the form ‘Is X right or wrong?’ could benefit from another round of clarifying questions.
Here, Saunders echoes Keats’s negative capability, of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. This book allows us to swim with great pleasure in that warm water. It is superb.
END
[March 2024: using the lens of this book to examine Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These].
An excellent podcast on the book with Saunders, interviewed by Dorian Lynskey: