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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo , which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way ; Tenth of December , a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone ; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline , Pastoralia , and In Persuasion Nation . He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) offers lessons from his graduate-level seminar on the Russian short story in this superb mix of instruction and literary criticism. In surveying seven stories by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol, Saunders concludes that the secret to crafting powerful fiction is, "Always be escalating. That's all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation." Each story is presented in full, along with Saunders's commentary: on Chekhov's "In the Cart," Saunders asks, "why we keep reading a story," and on Tolstoy's "Master and Man," he writes that facts can "draw us in" when the "language isn't particularly elevated or poetic." Saunders's teaching style, much like his fiction, is thoughtful with touches of whimsy, as when he breaks the action of Turgenev's "The Singers" into a table and compares the short story writer to a roller-coaster designer. The writing advice, meanwhile, is expansive: revising, he writes, involves intuition, and he views a story as a conversation. His closing note for writers is to "go forth and do what you please." Saunders's generous teachings--and the classics they're based on--are sure to please. (Jan.)
Booklist Review
How did Saunders, who first trained as an engineer and labored in oil fields, become a writer recognized with a Man Booker Prize and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships? In great part by reading the masters, especially the giants of nineteenth-century Russia's "resistance literature." So important to Saunders are the stories of Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, he's been teaching them to MFA students at Syracuse University, his alma mater, for more than two decades. Admirers of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and Saunders' equally imaginative short story collections will discover the full scope of his passion for and knowledge of literature in his deeply inquisitive, candid, funny, and philosophical analysis of seven stories, each included here, by his Russian mentors. Saunders discusses each story's structure, energy flow, the questions it raises, and how "meaning is made," embracing both technical finesse and the mysteries at creation's core, writing, "That's what craft is: A way to open ourselves up to the suprapersonal wisdom within us." He also shares his own experiences as a novice writer and explicates his view of fiction as a "vital moral-ethical tool." An invaluable and uniquely pleasurable master course and a generous celebration of reading, writing, and all the ways literature enriches our lives.
Guardian Review
This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment. Novelist and short story writer George Saunders has been teaching creative writing at Syracuse University in the US for the last 20 years, including a course in the 19th-century Russian short story in translation. "A few years back, after the end of one class (chalk dust hovering in the autumnal air, old-fashioned radiator clanking in the corner, marching band processing somewhere in the distance, let's say)," he had the realisation that "some of the best moments of my life, the moments during which I've really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching that Russian class." I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching, and agree wholeheartedly that there's not much on earth as good, if you're that way inclined, as an afternoon spent discussing sublime fiction with a class of eagerly intelligent apprentice writers, saturated in the story and greedy for insight and understanding (everyone saturated and greedy, the teacher along with the rest). He's right, too - as well as appealingly modest - in thinking that the best teaching is "of value" straightforwardly, as writing itself somehow can't be. You don't get up from your writing table believing you've done something "of value to the world". Now Saunders has developed as essays some of the thoughts arising from those classes, and put them together into a book alongside the stories he's discussing - by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol. These essays aren't anything like academic analysis. The questions that get asked in a reading-for-writers class are inflected differently from literary criticism - "Why did the writer do this?" rather than "How must we read this?" - even if they converge finally on the same points of appreciation, and the same questions of meaning. Saunders doesn't come from the end of a completed story but dives in at the beginning and into the middle, trying to experience it in the making, imagine why it unfolded the way it did. He takes Chekhov's "In the Cart", for instance, literally one page at a time, interrupting the text with his interrogations. Now, what do you know? And now? And what are you curious about? Where do you think the story is headed? Why did Chekhov go that way, and not this? So much for the death of the author. This kind of reading (one of the best kinds, I'm convinced) tracks the author's intentions - and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what's banal or obvious - so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence. Marya, a thwarted, lonely schoolmistress is making her way home in a cart from the town where she's gone to pick up her salary, to the bleak village school where she works. "She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back ¿ " Saunders begins to speculate forwards, as any reader is bound to. "The story has said of her, 'She is unhappy and can't imagine any other life for herself.' And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like, 'Well, we'll see about that.'" A less good writer than Chekhov might have worked with the grain of the expectation raised: something might happen to save Marya from her future. A love affair? As if on cue, one attractive and wealthy landowner appears alongside her in his carriage. But nothing doing: the landowner's a bit useless and ineffective, and anyway Marya's preoccupied by her problems with the janitor at school, who is rude to her and hits the boys. Good writing works in intricate relationship with a reader's expectations, raising them and leading them on, then sidestepping or surpassing them. Not merely disappointing them: the story can't do nothing with Marya, that would be cheating. We'd ask, what was it for, then? The writer has to find a sweet spot between an implausibly happy resolution and a brute refusal of satisfaction. He has to find out what movement there is, and what freedom, inside the story's particular conditions - but without cheaply magicking them away. Being Chekhov, in this case he finds it. (Read the story.) All this makes Saunders's book very different from just another "how to" creative writing manual, or just another critical essay. In enjoyably throwaway fashion, he assembles along his way a few rules for writing. "Be specific! Honour efficiency! ¿ "Always be escalating," he says. "That's all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating." There's truth in all of this, though I do wonder whether you can actually learn to write better by following these explicit prescriptions, or rules of craft, extracted from what you read. Perhaps. It's certainly true, in any case, that reading "In the Cart" or Tolstoy's "Master and Man" with this rich, close attention will mulch down into any would-be writer's experience, and repay them by fertilising their own work eventually, as they struggle with the words on their own page. Perhaps it's less like applying a series of lessons and more like the training of an intuition that flashes between hand, eye, mind. That defining human transaction, teaching and learning through imitation, the master's hand closed over the apprentice's to guide it. Saunders's concentration is often on the forward dynamic of the stories, their "tight, escalatory pattern". In "a highly organised system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional". Good writing is "the cumulative result of all this repetitive choosing on the line level, those thousands of editing microdecisions". This focus on process can sound occasionally like a reductive functionalism - each detail is there because it makes the story work. In reading, though, don't we feel it the other way round: as if the story were only there so that for a moment we can contemplate the truth of the detail, of the experience? At the climax of "Master and Man", wealthy merchant Vasili Andreevich, lost in a snowstorm at night and imagining the reality of his death for the first time, sees tall stalks of wormwood sticking out of the snow, "desperately tossing about under the pressure of the wind which beat it all to one side and whistled through it". The writing holds us still through its descriptive truthfulness, its miraculous verisimilitude. And that's in the writer too: he's not merely thinking how to entertain us more effectively. His effort at that moment of writing, in the midst of all his "repetitive choosing" (which is what makes the story work), is subordinated to the vision in his mind's eye, which holds still for him even as he labours to bring it into being. Saunders knows that too. One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story. He's particularly good on the ending of Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot", burrowing into all the things Tolstoy chooses not to say about the death of its protagonist, and ending, after much discussion of the story's point and its value, with his own "state of wondering", every time he reads it.
Kirkus Review
The renowned author delivers a master class on the Russian short story and on the timeless value of fiction. Though Saunders is known mainly as an inventive, award-winning writer--of novels, short stories, cultural criticism--he has also taught creative writing at Syracuse since 1997. "Some of the best moments of my life…have been spent teaching that Russian class," he writes. This is the book version of that class, illuminating seven stories by the masters: three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Turgenev and Gogol. All stories are included in full, and readers need not be familiar with Russian literature to find this plan richly rewarding. Opening with Chekhov's "The Cart," Saunders shows just how closely we'll be reading--a page or two of the original text at a time followed by multiple pages of commentary. The author seeks to answer "the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading?" As he shows throughout this thrilling literary lesson, the answer has little to do with conventional notions of theme and plot; it's more about energy, efficiency, intentionality, and other "details of internal dynamics." Saunders explains how what might seem like flaws often work in the story's favor and how we love some stories even more because of--rather than in spite of--those flaws. Saunders is always careful not to confuse the internal workings of a story with authorial intent. Once we become accustomed to reading like he reads, we proceed through the stories with great joy, anticipating even further delights with his explications to follow. "The resistance in the stories," he writes, "is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind." A master of contemporary fiction joyously assesses some of the best of the 19th century. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Here, the New York Times best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo discusses seven classic Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol that's he's been teaching for two decades at the Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. The stories (included here) are used to offer a broader understanding of how writing fiction works and what it means to us today.
Excerpts
Excerpts
A Page at a Time Thoughts on "In the Cart" Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring a series of painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: "But what do you like about the story?" I whined. There was a long pause at the other end. And Bill said this: "Well, I read a line. And I like it . . . enough to read the next." And that was it: his entire short story aesthetic and presumably that of the magazine. And it's perfect. A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn't), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us. I've taken a lot of comfort in this idea over the years. I don't need a big theory about fiction to write it. I don't have to worry about anything but: Would a reasonable person, reading line four, get enough of a jolt to go on to line five? Why do we keep reading a story? Because we want to. Why do we want to? That's the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading? Are there laws of fiction, as there are laws of physics? Do some things just work better than others? What forges the bond between reader and writer and what breaks it? Well, how would we know? One way would be to track our mind as it moves from line to line. A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. "A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building." Aren't you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You'll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly. We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments. For our first story, "In the Cart," by Anton Chekhov, I'm going to propose a one-time exception to the "basic drill" I just laid out in the introduction and suggest that we approach the story by way of an exercise I use at Syracuse. Here's how it works. I'll give you the story a page at a time. You read that page. Afterward, we'll take stock of where we find ourselves. What has that page done to us? What do we know, having read the page, that we didn't know before? How has our understanding of the story changed? What are we expecting to happen next? If we want to keep reading, why do we? Before we start, let's note, rather obviously, that, at this moment, as regards "In the Cart," your mind is a perfect blank. In the Cart They drove out of the town at half past eight in the morning. The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid, transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying in the fields over huge puddles that were like lakes, nor this marvelous, immeasurably deep sky, into which it seemed that one would plunge with such joy, offered anything new and interesting to Marya Vasilyevna, who was sitting in the cart. She had been teaching school for thirteen years, and in the course of all those years she had gone to the town for her salary countless times; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and what she always, invariably, longed for was to reach her destination as soon as possible. She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back, and again the school and again the road. * * * Now your mind is not so blank. How has the state of your mind changed? If we were sitting together in a classroom, which I wish we were, you could tell me. Instead, I'll ask you to sit quietly a bit and compare those two states of mind: the blank, receptive state your mind was in before you started to read and the one it's in now. Taking your time, answer these questions: 1. Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences. 2. What are you curious about? 3. Where do you think the story is headed? Whatever you answered, that's what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You'll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or "takes them into account" or "exploits them"). 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. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning. We might say that what's happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, "about" something. What is it about, for you, so far? What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring. So: What do you care about in this story, so far? It's Marya. Now: What is the flavor of that caring? How, and where, were you made to care about her? In the first line, we learn that some unidentified "they" are driving out of some town, early in the morning. "The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying in the fields . . ." I've bolded the two appearances of the word "but" above (and yes, I phrase it that way to avoid saying, "I bolded the two buts above") to underscore that we're looking at two iterations of the same pattern: "The conditions of happiness are present, but happiness is not." It's sunny, but there's still snow on the ground. Winter has ended, but this offers nothing new or interesting to . . . and we wait to hear who it is, taking no solace in the end of this long Russian winter. Even before there's a person in the story, there's an implied tension between two elements of the narrative voice, one telling us that things are lovely (the sky is "marvelous" and "immeasurably deep") and another resisting the general loveliness. (It would be, already, a different-feeling story, had it started: "The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, and although there was still snow in the ditches and the woods, it just didn't matter: winter, evil, dark, long, had, at long last, ended.") Halfway through the second paragraph, we find that the resisting element within the narrative voice belongs to one Marya Vasilyevna, who, failing to be moved by springtime, appears in the cart at the sound of her name. Of all of the people in the world he might have put in this cart, Chekhov has chosen an unhappy woman resisting the charms of springtime. This could have been a story about a happy woman (newly engaged, say, or just given a clean bill of health, or a woman just naturally happy), but Chekhov elected to make Marya unhappy. Then he made her unhappy in a particular flavor, for particular reasons: she's been teaching school for thirteen years; has done this trip to town "countless times" and is sick of it; feels she's been living in "these parts" for a hundred years; knows every stone and tree on the way. Worst of all, she can imagine no other future for herself. This could have been a story about a person unhappy because she's been scorned in love, or because she's just received a fatal diagnosis, or because she's been unhappy since the moment she was born. But Chekhov chose to make Marya a person unhappy because of the monotony of her life. Out of the mist of every-story-that-could-possibly-be, a particular woman has started to emerge. We might say that the three paragraphs we've just read were in service of increased specification. Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification. The writer asks, "Which particular person is this, anyway?" and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward. As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call "plot" increases. (Although that's a word I don't like much--let's replace it with "meaningful action.") As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases. Excerpted from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| We Begin | p. 3 |
| In the Cart | p. 9 |
| A Page at a Time: Thoughts on "In the Cart" | p. 11 |
| Afterthought #1 | p. 60 |
| The Singers | p. 63 |
| The Heart of the Story: Thoughts on "The Singers" | p. 84 |
| Afterthought #2 | p. 110 |
| The Darling | p. 119 |
| A Pattern Story: Thoughts on "The Darling " | p. 134 |
| Afterthought #3 | p. 161 |
| Master and Man | p. 165 |
| And Yet They Drove On: Thoughts on "Master and Man" | p. 217 |
| Afterthought #4 | p. 244 |
| The Nose | p. 249 |
| The Door to the Truth Might Be Strangeness: Thoughts on "The Nose" | p. 276 |
| Afterthought #5 | p. 305 |
| Gooseberries | p. 311 |
| A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: Thoughts on "Gooseberries" | p. 324 |
| Afterthought #6 | p. 343 |
| Alyosha the Pot | p. 349 |
| The Wisdom of Omission: Thoughtson "Alyosha the Pot" | p. 357 |
| Afterthought #7 | p. 381 |
| We End | p. 385 |
| Appendices | p. 393 |
| Appendix A A Cutting Exercise | p. 395 |
| Appendix B An Escalation Exercise | p. 400 |
| Appendix C A Translation Exercise | p. 403 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 407 |
| List of Texts | p. 409 |
| Additional Resources | p. 411 |
| Credits | p. 413 |
