A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life by George Saunders

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for 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, questions like, 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?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

Saunders gives us so much to think about - I felt like I was really in a writing class.

Saunders rallies against the idea that the best writing flows from the author fluidly, riding on wings of sudden inspiration. Instead he argues that the real process lies in incremental revision, and that finding your voice as an author comes from the intuition guiding these countless small changes and refinements.

The main satisfaction in reading this, for me, was gaining a greater appreciation of what it is that made these Russian masters so good at their craft.

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It's just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response. What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

There's a description in The Goldfinch of a main character's “oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call ‘the Planet of Earth.'” When I read this book I thought of that quote. If I had one word to describe Saunders' outlook and his writing, it would be “humane” - both in what he would term a “moral-ethical” dimension, and also in a literal sense of always pertaining to humanity and humanness, for which he demonstrates such an oddball and unthwartable faith.

Prior to this book, I had read a handful of classic Russian short stories, and always because it was compulsory, part of some curriculum. I don't gravitate to short stories or older fiction, so the thing that brought me here was all Saunders. In this book, he shares thoughts on thinking, reading, writing, and revising, and how each of those things can shape the way we understand ourselves and each other. He does so in response to works of Russian literature by four of the greats (helpfully embedded in the book).

I highlighted so much of this book and can't wait to reread it.

Saunders more or less aims to recreate one of his upper level literature classes in this book. He takes you through some classic Russian short stories and gives his analysis and opinions. It starts out a little dry, but it's certainly worth sticking with, especially if you are interested in the craft of writing. As a musician and composer myself, I found it to be a fascinating look into another medium and how artists in that medium operate. Saunders is direct and concise, while still offering beautiful prose. His writing goes a long way to make stories from another time and another culture enjoyable and relatable to modern audiences.