A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: A masterclass in how to write by George Saunders

The career of the modern writer: write a great work (or, in some cases, just write a work); wait for some random university to hire you under some honorary title; sit in a shared office that has the same atmosphere as a European hostel; be occasionally wheeled out to impart your great knowledge upon the next generation of would-be adjunct professors; be grateful you survived another year.

It is a bleak but time-honoured tradition. And I suppose there is a certain thrill for the student walking into a cosy classroom and there, behind the lectern, is Maya Angelou or Vladimir Nabokov or Zadie Smith.

For the past 20 years, George Saunders (one of the greatest living writers, I doubt anyone would disagree) has been teaching a class on 19th-century Russian short fiction in translation at Syracuse University. His latest work, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is this class in book form.

Winter Nights

And the book very much feels like a class. There are seven stories, each by one of the four masters of the Russian short story (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol), which must be read closely. Each is followed by an in-depth close reading of the story. There’s no skipping the readings or checking Wikipedia here; Saunders is a strict disciplinarian.

The purpose of the Syracuse lectures, and subsequently of the book itself, is to investigate exactly how and why these stories work, to completely dismantle them, look at each part and question why it’s there. For example, for the first story of the book, Chekhov’s In the Cart, Saunders proffers a page-by-page analysis, whereby we read a page of the story and then Saunders comes in and we analyse the page we just read.

It’s a real baptism of fire to begin the book with such a meticulous exercise in close reading, but there is always method to Saunders’s madness.

The madness of King George continues when we analyse Turgenev’s The Singers, a longwinded and arduous story that he loves to take apart purely because it is longwinded and arduous. However, like the best lecturers, his analysis makes you almost love the story and understand exactly why Turgenev wrote it that way.

I was not familiar with any of the stories that Saunders dissects, apart from Gogol’s The Nose. And, for some of us, having a writer like Saunders analyse The Nose is something far beyond our wildest dreams.

However, there is the question of who exactly this book is for? To describe it as a niche publication is something of an understatement. Even as a Saunders fan, I often found the book to be quite an arduous undertaking. But I suppose that is mostly my fault for approaching it as a critic and not as a student.

I would not suggest reading this book straight-through, as I did, because that is akin to synthesising an entire module’s worth of information into a couple of sittings. Instead, it is a work best dipped in and out of, whenever you feel your brain needs a refresher or you just feel like listening to a very clever man saying very clever things.

But, in the end, what is the point of the book? If it were simply just George Saunders talking about Russian short stories then it would be a lot of fun but, ultimately, pointless. No, throughout the book Saunders sets out exercises for the reader.

In one you have to get out your red pen and edit down one of his own stories (as sacrilegious as that may feel). In another, Saunders gives you 45 minutes to write a 200-word story. The catch is you must only use the same 50 words. For this is the actual objective of the class, through all the meandering and the deconstruction, Saunders is actually teaching his students (and, by proxy, you) how to successfully write a short story.

I doubt A Swim in a Pond in the Rain will lead to a great swell of writers suddenly turning their lectures into books. And judging from what I’ve heard from writer friends who’ve experienced great authors giving these lectures, few would be able to fill 400 pages quite so easily as Saunders). But when you judge it for exactly what it is – a master of the short story taking you through his process, using the great Russians as sandboxes – then A Swim in a Pond is truly worth its weight in gold.