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

For whatever reason, I have never really sought out short stories - but I loved George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo" so I was excited to check out "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain". By the end of the book I have slotted in a couple of books of stories - one by Saunders and another set of Russian classics - into my reading queue.The book is essentially an on-paper class on the short story form and analysis of classic Russian fiction as taught by Syracuse professor Saunders. Does that sound pretty awesome to you? It did to me, and it still does - and I highly recommend it!In terms of structure, you read the original (translated, obviously) story and then Saunders digs into all aspects of the story thoroughly, followed by an afterword where he brings additional context. For the first story he takes things apart one page at a time, which was actually incredibly instructive and sets your mind into an analytical frame for the remainder of the book. That was important for me, as the style and importance of each word and sentence of a short story is much greater than in a longer novel or analysis book.There is some really great stuff here - from disparate stories such ‘Master and Man’ to ‘The Nose’, you are taken on a journey of wildly varying styles, narration, subjects, intents, and translational difficulties. These are clearly masters of the form - in ‘Master and Man’ I put the book aside for a couple of days because I knew bad stuff was coming and wasn’t ready yet!If I had a single complaint - and of course I do - it is that the combined story analysis and afterthoughts started to ‘overstay their welcome’ for the stories in the middle of the book. A couple of times I found myself saying “I GET IT” and had to slog through the extended analysis - but it wasn’t that I disagreed or had issues with Saunders’ takes on things, just that I was already ‘there’ in terms of understanding the story and nuances.While reading these stories and the analysis I learned a ton about the form - every sentence had a purpose, every paragraph advanced the action - and wondered why I never got into them before. I am excited to read collections of stories soon!Make no mistake - this is as much a college course as it is a set of short stores. There are exercises and side-studies for the reader to do, such as reworking paragraphs of text. If you are interested in not just reading great stories, but also learning about the form, authors and individual stories in depth I strongly recommend checking it out!

This review also serves as a “note to self” about the ways this book can and will make me a better writer.It already has. Saunders held my hand and walked me through seven short stories written by the famous Russian writers of the 19th century. He prompted me to listen to my own reactions as I read, and that has helped me better understand the ways we writers pull readers into our made-up world and cause them to react.I’m not a fan of short stories. After reading “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” I now believe that’s because I underestimated the art of the form. In a novel, character, place, and plot emerge over hundreds of pages. A short-story writer needs to accomplish their purpose in just a few. To do so, they use every trick in the book. Maybe I should read short stories more slowly and consciously.Saunders makes it fun to detect writerly expertise in distilled short story masterpieces. These Russian guys – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and Turgenev – had to be particularly clever because they were taking swipes at the power structure – something I aspire to do in my own writing. Their characters were odd, their neighbors nasty, their towns dysfunctional, their stories fanciful. But every line served the purpose of the story – to cause the reader’s mind to end up in a place different than where it began.A string of George Saunders pearls that I cherish:• “In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins.”• “We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask. … If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.”• “A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick.”• “Every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.”• “(A linked pair of writing dictums: ‘Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.’)”• “Chekhov once said, ‘Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.’ ‘Formulate them correctly’ might be taken to mean: ‘make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.’”• “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it. … it wants to be its best self, and if you’re patient with it, in time, it will be.”• “We know how things are and how they are not. We know how things tend to work and how they don’t. We know how things mostly go and how they never go. And we like it when a story agrees with our sense of how the world works. It gives us a thrill, and this thrill-at-truth keeps us reading. In a story entirely made up, it’s actually the main thing that keeps us reading. Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism.”• “I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. … It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.”• “That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.”• “If I think of a story as something that has to convey a certain message, as a train that has to pull into a certain station at a certain time, and myself as the stressed-out engineer trying to make that happen—it’s too much. I freeze up and no fun is had. But if I imagine myself as a sort of genial carnival barker, trying to usher you into my magical black box, the workings of which even I don’t fully understand—that, I can do.”• “I once heard someone say that “given infinite time, anything can happen.” That’s how this way of revising makes me feel. No need for overarching decisions; the story has a will of its own, one it is trying to make me feel, and if I just trust in that, all will be well, and the story will surpass my initial vision of it.”Saunders speaks directly to writers. As the above pearls demonstrate, his writing is beautiful. But he feels our pain. He describes a period in his early writing in which he imitated Hemingway. But:“… having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled ‘Saunders Mountain.’ ‘Hmm,’ I thought. ‘It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.’ Then again, that was my name on it. … What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”I came away from this book feeling less a piker. I will write and I hope that I move my readers – however many. I likely will not achieve the heights of Tolstoy, but Saunders helped me see that isn’t the goal.“… part of my job (part of your job) is to find new paths for the story form to go down; to make stories that are as powerful as these Russian stories but that, in their voice and form and concerns, are new, meaning that they respond to the things history has given us to know about life on earth in the years since these Russians were here.”I am a teacher, as is Saunders. He validates my own belief that I learn as I teach. He says that in the process of writing this book, “My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit. I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).”And that’s exactly how I now feel, thanks to this book.