George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ****

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a textbook of sorts for a college writing workshop. It includes seven stories from 19th-century Russian authors (three Chekhov, two Tolstoy, one each from Turgenev and Gogol), each followed by discussion notes and associated writing exercises. It strikes a perfect balance between literary criticism and writing advice.

Saunders advocates a bottom-up approach to writing, focusing on the details of the language and on individual moments rather than coming to the task with a predefined structure or point to make.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

The very helpful exercises involve constant revision and attention, with the style and characters and themes emerging through the process. Saunders admits at one point that the "moment of supposed triumph [when he discovered his authorial voice] was also sad" because it wasn't like the voices he'd set out to emulate from the masters. In his analysis of the stories, he often imagines the author ending up with a different, fuller story than the one he started to write.

The seven classic stories are... fine. I have to admit that most of them don't speak to me as deeply as they speak to Saunders. He draws many excellent general lessons from his close readings, but I was less than fully engaged with the details.

The one story that did captivate me was Chekhov's "Gooseberries," which just happens to be the story to which the book title refers. Its richness, complexity, and ambiguity landed with me in a way the others didn't. Is it moral to be happy when your happiness depends on others' misfortune?

Saunders suggests that when we read stories –– or even an instructional book like this one ––we pretend to accept the position and views of the author "to see if there might be something in it." At the end, the reader or student "snaps out of it, disavows the [author/]teacher's view, which is starting to feel like a set of bad-fitting clothes anyway, and goes back to her own way of thinking." This view sounds quite similar to my long-proclaimed penchant for "trying on" different worldviews, which like Saunders I consider to be a moral exercise.