‘To reconsider is noble – even holy’

George Saunders’s step-by-step guide to Russian short stories is a masterclass in how to be human

A SWIM IN A POND

IN THE RAIN by George Saunders

432pp, Bloomsbury, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £11.89 ÌÌÌÌÌ

This mightn’t be a very alluring start to a review, I appreciate – but think for a minute about Brexit. If you were a Leaver, was there also a part of you that wondered if life in the EU was really terrible enough to risk withdrawal? If a Remainer, whether the EU was worryingly undemocratic in its determination to enforce ever-greater union? According to George Saunders, the

answer in both cases is a firm “of course” – because “any idea we express is just one of many we have within us”. While “we choose to identify with… certain of those ideas and dampen others”, the contradictions inside us remain.

Needless to say, this isn’t a wildly fashionable view nowadays. (When I tried it yesterday on my impeccably modern children, they reacted with a mixture of incomprehension and outrage.) Even so, Saunders makes an overwhelming case that such acknowledgement of ambivalence is both the basis and purpose of all serious fiction.

Left to our own devices, each of us “takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating

from that point of view”. Luckily, the great writers are on hand to urge us on in the sometimes uncomfortable business not merely of considering other perspectives but of experiencing them. Faced with literature as good as the seven short stories presented and dissected here, Saunders declares, we’re “reminded that my mind is not the only mind”. The effect is nothing less than to make us “more expansive, generous people”.

Impressively, though, for all its moral gravitas, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is enormous fun to read: infectiously enthusiastic, chatty, full of jokes and (quite sweary) slang. Nor are there many people better placed to write it. Before winning the 2017 Booker Prize with

Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders was long established as one of the finest short-story authors around – and for the past 20 years he has taught a class at Syracuse University on the Russian short story: a class he obviously draws on heavily here.

Each of the seven sections has the full text of a particular story – three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, one apiece by Gogol and Turgenev – followed by Saunders’s close reading of it. Each section, that is, except the first, where Chekhov’s “In the Cart” is printed one page at a time, with Saunders popping up in between to point out how every fresh piece of information deepens and complicates what we already know. In his courteous way, Saunders apologises if these interruptions are irritating – but in fact they richly confirm his central thesis that the art of reading consists of paying careful attention to how our minds are responding at any given moment. With that lesson learnt, we’re duly inspired to read the remaining six stories with equal care, partly in the hope that what we notice will match what Saunders

has noticed in those close readings of his. (Spoiler alert: it won’t.)

The only time the book perhaps falters is in its analysis of Gogol’s “The Nose”, whose irreducible strangeness sees Saunders taking refuge in uncharacteristically windy generalisations (one of which even includes the phrase “what Gogol is all about”). Otherwise, he’s unfailingly, often thrillingly illuminating not only about the individual stories, but short stories in general: how every element must earn its keep; how our expectations must be simultaneously respected and confounded; and, especially, how the best ones force/ enable their readers to realise there are many different ways of looking at the same events and characters –

which is where all that ambivalence comes in.

And, as it turns out, not just their readers. One of Saunders’s many tips for would-be writers is that the worst method for producing a short story is to decide in advance what you want to say and then say it. Instead, by repeatedly (indeed, obsessively) revising every sentence in accordance with the demands of the story rather than your pre-held views, you end up with something far wiser and more compassionate than you are. Even the famously dogmatic Tolstoy, Saunders argues convincingly, takes a much less stern line on human shortcomings when they

belong to the characters he’s exploring so thoroughly.

None the less, it’s Chekhov who emerges as Saunders’s real hero. In the essay on Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” (the story containing the book’s eponymous swim), he beautifully demonstrates how inconclusive its conclusions are – and how this in turn proves that it’s “noble – holy even” to reconsider what we think that we think. Published any time, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain would be a joyous reminder that fiction is “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised”. Published now, it feels like vital and civilising corrective to the pretend certainties of public life – and, increasingly, of our personal lives too.

Great writing makes us truly understand ‘that my mind is not the only mind’