books

There is a particular kind of book that arrives trailing the aura of a coveted classroom, and George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain wears that aura perhaps more openly than any craft book in recent memory. The premise is simple and almost irresistibly generous: twenty years of teaching the 19th-century Russian short story to Syracuse MFA students, condensed into seven essays built around seven complete stories - three from Chekhov, two from Tolstoy, one each from Turgenev and Gogol. The homework is included. You are not allowed to skip it.

What Saunders does best is read slowly in public. He works through the stories a page or two at a time, pausing to ask what expectations have been set, which have been upended, and why a reader leans forward at one sentence and drifts at another. His governing question is the million-dollar one: what makes a reader keep reading? His answer has little to do with theme or plot in the schoolroom sense, and everything to do with energy, efficiency, intentionality, and what he calls escalation. When Chekhov's Marya, in "In the Cart," is briefly jolted out of her own life by the sight of a familiar face, Saunders treats the moment as a small detonation - proof that a story's vibrancy lives in the character's capacity to be changed. It is the kind of observation that reroutes your reading for days afterward.

The tone is the book's great asset. Saunders is conversational, self-deprecating, and almost obsessively fair to the reader's own taste, forever urging the trusting of one's internal "shit detector" rather than the surrendering to any received wisdom. His afterthoughts on his own revision process - the sentence-by-sentence reworking, the "meaningful action" he prefers to plot, the intuitive preferences he follows and then interrogates - are the book's most quietly thrilling passages. Gogol's "The Nose" gets a particularly fine treatment, with skaz narration likened, in a leap that actually clarifies it, to Borat and Dwight Schrute.

The book is not flawless. Some essays make modest points at considerable length, and a few stories - Tolstoy's "Master and Man" is the usual sticking point - are a slog to get through even with a sympathetic guide. There is also a real tension the book never quite resolves: these seven stories are gloriously unalike, and the rules and schemas offered to explain them can feel too tidy for writers whose greatness lies partly in their wildness. If a whole generation of fiction starts sounding like it came out of the same workshop, books like this one carry some of the responsibility. The instruction is most persuasive when Saunders is reading closely, least persuasive when he is generalising into a system.

Still, the overwhelming experience is of warmth and usefulness. It works for writers mining it for craft, and just as well for readers who want to slow down and notice more. By the time the last essay closes, the book has done something rarer than either teaching or criticism usually manages: it has made the act of reading feel like a practice worth taking seriously, and a reliably humane one at that.