The act of connection
Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders talks about his new book that offers lessons in getting better at reading and writing
George Saunders, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, has been variously described as the “best short story writer in English” and “one-man defibrillator” of the form. As a writer who chronicles “the lost, the unlucky, and the disenfranchised,” he is greatly invested in the goodness of humankind and his writing often makes the reader want to be a better person. In their horror and hilarity, subversion and satirical energy, his stories exude warmth and humanity. Saunders (62), whose latest, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life was released on January 12, says it is precisely these aspects — the sense of increased alertness, of seeing the world anew — that really makes a story a “moral-ethical document”. While he doesn’t consciously work on this, because to do so would make for stories that are too neat and reductive, that is always his intention. He believes this alertness can happen even in the face of a very dark work, if that work is a “highly organized system.” “It may be that that is what we respond to — that sense that a work of art has been refined into uniqueness,” he writes in an email interaction.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain brings together lessons in getting better at reading and writing, interpreting and analyzing, based on Saunders’ two decades of teaching the Russian masters at Syracuse University’s graduate MFA creative writing program. Saunders, who is a little suspicious of any “general” approach to writing fiction, says he hopes the book is more than just a writer’s manual — one that is as valuable to the writer as it is to the reader, one that also deliberates on what art/fiction should do. “The idea is that the reader and I will huddle over these classic stories and see what we can tease out about the short story form itself — and then, that that knowledge will ‘land’ differently on each of us and, I hope, help each of us in our individual artistic struggle,” he says.
In his artistic quest, Saunders has come to the works of Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai
Gogol, again and again in different mindsets over the years because their stories seem to speak to the reader “differently at different times” in his life. He finds them very wise in that way. He understands that the best thing about reading the Russians is “the realization that minds can connect, across time and space — they really can”. Saunders believes the work of reading a story is about the act of connection. It is “about understanding the great power of connection, and also of working on that connection on a sort of micro-basis; asking, as we read, ‘Am I in or out? If I am in — why am I? If out, what threw me out?’ This is all a way of learning about how the mind works; how it judges, how it processes language.”
The book features three stories by Chekhov (In the Cart, The Darling and Gooseberries, two by Tolstoy (Master and Man and Alyosha the Pot) and one each by Turgenev (The Singers) and Gogol (The Nose). Each of these stories is followed by Saunders’ commentary. While he loves Chekhov, he has also found, over the years, that his stories teach really well. “They are very classic in their shape and in the way they proceed,” says the author whose anthologies of short stories include Pastoralia (2000) and Tenth of December: Stories (2013), a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders explains the craft to the reader through apt metaphors. Writing, he says, might be a bit like quantum physics — the truth of it is best got at by way of poetry and allusion, rather than direct, reductive statement. He says: “There is no one truth and so we need to approach giving ‘advice’ with a lot of humility — basically always saying, not, ‘Here is how to do it,’ but, rather ‘Might this help?’”
Saunders, along with other American writers like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has set the new terms for contemporary American fiction. Joshua Ferris, whose works Saunders loves, once wrote that there was a shared acknowledgement among writers that Saunders writes like “something of a saint”. Saunders says: “I wish that was true but — and I say this from the very authoritative/ unfortunate position of being located inside my own head: no trace of saintliness in there, or in my day-to-day life. Neuroses, good intentions, hard work, yes, but saintliness, no.” What Saunders does believe, however, is that each of us can, through the artistic process, work toward (or at least glimpse) “a better version of ourselves”.
In his students’ work, Saunders sees a new urgency; he says that they seem to accept the notion that fiction should take on the big issues and should acknowledge the current and catastrophic state of affairs in the US. “They also understand that, to do this doesn’t necessarily mean writing directly ‘about’ politics, but maybe recognizing that ‘a political story’ is really just ‘a good story, with people in it.’ That is, a story that is about human aspiration and limitation and sorrow,” he says. The biggest advice Saunders has offered to his students is: “learn to revise, in your own flavor.” All of a writer’s particular obstructions, and the ways he/she will overcome those, he says, are only going to be discovered by the hard work of revising.
The other piece of advice he gives his students is to not underestimate the power of living boldly. “We can transform our artistic self by refining our actual self. So, I encourage them to nurture in themselves a genuine curiosity about the world,” he says.
The focus of Saunders’ artistic life has been to learn to write stories that a reader feels compelled to finish. “I consider myself more vaudevillian than scholar,” he writes. The author imagines there’s a meter in his head that measures his engagement as a reader. “When that meter is saying, ‘High Engagement! Loving it!’ — I don’t change anything. When, on the other hand, it starts saying, ‘Ugh, boring! Condescending! Go watch a movie at once!’ — well, then I know that editing is needed. And the whole trick is learning to be in touch with what that meter is saying — to learn to trust our own taste and judgment and then have confidence that we can act on the same,” he says.