Literature and Life

On A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

George Saunders’ premise in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is that he is recreating the experience of a class he teaches to MFA students on seven nineteenth-century Russian short stories. I read it slowly, sometimes reading another entire book in between chapters. It was an enjoyably complex reading experience and one that benefitted from a leisurely pace — who wants to rush through close readings of Russian short stories anyway? He includes the stories themselves — three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Gogol and Turgenev — and follows each one with a chapter breaking down how they work in terms of plot development, detail, characterization, etc. and gleaning lessons for aspiring writers.

The book’s subtitle, “In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life,” is odd because these are very much George Saunders’s lessons, not the Russians’. I’m not sure the Russians would approve of what Saunders is teaching! But otherwise, the subtitle is apt: this is a book about craft and close reading, yes, but it’s also a book about living. It’s unabashedly about morality, fairness, empathy, and our responsibilities as human beings. He writes about what change literature can make in the world, what it means to be a good person, and whether reading makes us better people. This is a book for people who like a personal touch to their literary criticism, for people who don’t mind large doses of earnestness and meditations on literature that verge on the spiritual.

Thinking about you, my newsletter readers, some of you will love this and some of you will hate it. It made me a little bit uncomfortable, as does any outpouring of earnestness and sincerity. And yet Saunders’s readings of the stories manage to be both entertaining and thorough. I am someone who will read literary criticism for fun, so perhaps I’m not the most reliable one to make this judgment, but this book is 400+ pages of genuinely absorbing criticism and writing advice. I don’t think this is easy to pull off! At times, the book is also mildly annoying. Sincerity makes me uncomfortable, but that’s because part of me loves it, while the other part, the analytical part, has some doubts. And that’s how I read this book: avidly, happily, admiringly, but also thinking, “Omg, Saunders, drop the folksy tone! This is a little too cute! Your examples are absurd, and, yes, you do that to be entertaining, but they are so consistently absurd it gets wearying. Can you tone it down a bit?” But if you have read Saunders before, you know that asking him to tone it down a bit is, in itself, absurd.

That said, I feel like I learned some things about how fiction works. Saunders is great at distilling usable bits of advice (relevant to writing AND reading) from his lengthy chapters and reminding you of the advice he’s already given as he moves on to the next thing. He’s obviously a great teacher, probably wildly entertaining, while also skilled at moving back and forth between the big picture and the smallest of details, and at ranging widely while also keeping the day’s lesson (the chapter’s lesson) in focus.

He also makes being a writer seem accessible, possible, something that anyone can do and anyone can improve at, even if none of us will end up being Tolstoy. For Saunders, being a writer is all about developing a writerly intuition that lets you work on the sentence level, which is where everything is encapsulated and from which everything emerges. It’s about making your sentences more and more detailed and specific, which narrows the possibilities for what your story can be while at the same time opening a path forward, the path that will be the story itself. Developing this intuition is developing your voice and giving expression to the deeper parts of your mind, where stuff you’re not even aware of is going on. He makes the point that good writing is smarter than its author, an idea that could be useful in talking with students who want to know whether an author really intended to put that extremely subtle bit of meaning there or not. Who knows! Through writing, an author ends up “saying” more than they realize. The process is mysterious, maybe even mystical.

I’m drawn to this narrow sentence-level focus and the belief that larger ideas come from choices made in individual sentences. I like the way it encourages building self-confidence and trust in one’s mind and one’s process. But I wonder if there is a place in Saunders’s thinking for writers who work more explicitly and directly with ideas, who approach writing in a more cerebral, less intuitive way. I also wonder what Saunders would make of fiction that doesn’t follow the typical plot structure, that is experimental. What would he make of the kind of meandering, aimless fiction I love or with fiction that doesn’t try to develop realistic characters or that explores an idea rather than telling a story? Saunders’s own fiction is weird, arguably experimental, but it still has many of the trappings of traditional fiction. However, to be fair, Saunders makes clear that he is describing his own writing process only, not everyone’s, and I’m not going to fault him for not including every kind of fiction there is, even if I would have liked him to.

Perhaps more damning criticism has come from people who point out that by taking nineteenth-century Russian short stories out of context and using them for his own purposes, he flattens their meaning. Check out this essay by Jennifer Wilson in Bookforum to see what I mean. She points out ways he mischaracterizes these authors and overlooks their political commitments. She also accuses him of being part of an “empathy industrial complex,” of valuing one’s ability to empathize above all else.

It would take another long essay to think through this particular idea, which I’m not entirely sure is fair, and I’m not going to write that essay now (or ever). I’ll just say that this book is fascinating and it made me think and feel things. If you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you think.

Don’t Forget About

I read Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska in grad school, and I’m grateful to the professor who assigned it to me because I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and it’s a book I remember fondly. It was published in 1925 and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi. They live in New York City’s Lower East Side. The family deals with poverty, with crowded living conditions, and with their father’s dictatorial ways. The women in the family struggle to survive while their father spends all his time studying the Torah. Sara watches her father push her older sisters away from men they love and into bad marriages. She is determined to make a different life for herself. The novel is intense — it bristles with anger and the women’s struggles are hard to take. It’s also a great story and an important glimpse into Jewish immigrant life in New York City.

Publishing This Week

Small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR:

• Elemental: Earth Stories, edited by Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press): an anthology of fiction and reportage about the relationship of humans and the earth, including writers in translation from around the world.

• I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement by Jessica Zucker (Feminist Press): a memoir about and study of the cultural meaning of miscarriages by a psychologist and creator of #IHadaMiscarriage campaign.

• Out of the Cage by Fernanda García Lao, translated by Will Vanderhyden (Deep Vellum): a novel in translation by an Argentinian writer. First-person narrator Aurora Berro dies in a freak accident and remains in limbo, observing her family. Apparently the author has been called "the strangest writer of Argentine literature," so I’m prepared for some weirdness.

• Her Here by Amanda Dennis (Bellevue Literary Press): a novel about a woman who leaves grad school and a long-term relationship to search for a woman who went missing in Thailand six years earlier.

New on the TBR

This week I thought I would round up my newly acquired books AND the books I’ve added to my wishlist, my list of books I’d like to acquire and read at some point. I keep a very long and, if I do say so myself, truly excellent list of books that intrigue me (and that I don’t yet own) over on Goodreads. I add to it all the time and then take the books off when I finally get a copy. First, here are the books that have newly entered my house:

• Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse by Anahid Nersessian (University of Chicago Press, 2021): personal meditations on Keats’s odes.

• Graceland, At Last: And Other Essays from the New York Times by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions, publishing this coming September): An advanced copy from the publisher, personal and reported essays from the U.S. south.

• Ellis Island by Georges Perec, translated by Harry Mathews (New Directions, 2021): the latest installment in my New Directions subscription. A meditation on Ellis Island and the people who came to the U.S. through it.

Next, here are some of the books I’ve added to my wishlist:

• Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, illustrated by Bettina Kaiser (Zerogram Press, 2020): a bunch of people recommended this on twitter, and one person (thank you, Dorian) said this is not only a great book, but it’s a great book for me. I don’t know what it’s about, and that’s fine. I ordered a copy yesterday.

• Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness (McSweeney’s, 2021): a memoir/essay collection about mothering and vulnerability.

• Be Holding by Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020): a book-length poem about Julius Erving’s “impossible move” in the 1980s NBA finals — and a lot more. I was assured by David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast interview with Ross Gay that even people who don’t care about basketball will find much to love in this book.

  

Currently Reading

• An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Columbia University Press, 2021): originally published in 1995, this is a novel about a woman deciding whether to return to Japan after having lived in the U.S. for twenty years.

• White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad (Catapult, 2020): my current audiobook, a look at the intersection of race and gender and how white feminism harms women of color.

The Cormac Report

Cormac’s teacher reads a chapter book to his class slowly, spending weeks or even months on it. Last fall he read them The Collector by K.R. Alexander, which, as best as I can tell, is middle-grade horror (Cormac is in 2nd grade). Cormac found the book intriguing but genuinely scary. I could see he was thinking about it a lot. He was newly afraid of being alone in his room and worried about having The Collector on his mind when he went to bed in case it caused nightmares. He wasn’t terrified, exactly, but he was concerned. I was concerned too. I very much like Cormac’s teacher and I believe in making reading exciting and meaningful for kids, whatever that takes. I really, really want to trust teachers and let them do their thing without any input from me. But it did cross my mind that maybe I should let him know that Cormac was finding the book scary. Maybe he should rethink that particular choice?? I wondered how other parents were feeling and whether they considered saying something. I mean, is it a good idea to read horror novels to second graders, even middle-grade horror?

I have no idea. But the moment just kind of passed. The teacher kept reading the book, Cormac kept enjoying it, and he didn’t seem scared anymore. In fact, he asked that we buy a copy of The Collector for ourselves, plus a couple of the sequels. He read these books on his own for awhile before getting distracted by other things. It was all fine, and I’m left wondering whether Cormac’s teacher was absolutely, unambiguously right in this book choice or whether he was doing something risky that just happened to work out okay.

I have no idea what the right time to introduce certain kinds of books to kids is. I believe in letting Cormac read whatever he wants, except … actually I don’t, really, because he won’t be reading any Stephen King books any time soon. But at the same time he doesn’t want to read Stephen King because he knows those books will scare him. The reality is that I am letting him read whatever he wants. So far at least, he’s handling it just fine.

Have a good week everyone!