george saunders a swim in the pond in the rain

Personally, I can live with that concept much easier than I have ever been able to do with that of plot, which has always seemed too artificial to me. And this is only one example of the way Saunders continually surprises us with an idiosyncratic slant on the craft of fiction writing. The four Russian short story writers whose work Saunders analyzes are Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev. Saunders’s method, except with the first story (which he presents piecemeal), is to offer the story for the aspiring writer to read entire, then to provide an interpretive analysis, and finally to finish with an “Afterthought,” in which further lessons are extrapolated. Saunders’s book is invaluable because, as one might expect of this writer, his postulates are utterly unique, are unlike advice you would get from any other fiction writer. The stories he visits are, in order, Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” Turgenev’s “The Singers,” Chekhov’s “The Darling,” Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” Gogol’s “The Nose,” Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” and Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot.” (The last-named story is the only one I feel he could have left out: to my mind, this is one of Tolstoy’s worst short stories. Any of a dozen Tolstoy stories, I believe, would have made better reading and better material for analysis. For one thing, Tolstoy was a past master at describing action, and a story like “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” gives him ample latitude for displaying this formidable talent, as do several others of his stories.)īut A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is chock full of useful insights. One of the most useful for me comes when Saunders is analyzing the first page of “In the Cart.” He says that he does not much like the word “plot”: “let’s replace it with ‘meaningful action.’” He expands upon what he means by that meaningful action is action that engages the mind and imagination of the reader and advances the narrative. Doubtless George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life has been reviewed to a frazzle by now, but I also believe many of Black Fox’s readers have not read this hugely informative book. It is worth reviewing for those readers because it is a window into the creative theories of one of our masters of the short story form, Saunders himself (considered by many the best short story writer in English today), and because the masterful Russian writers analyzed in this book, particularly Chekhov and Tolstoy, are such fertile ground for inspiration.

George saunders a swim in the pond in the rain