A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN

‘I sometimes joke that we’re reading back to see what we can steal’

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Bloomsbury, 432pp, £16.99

George Saunders is an American novelist and short story writer who won the Booker in 2017 with Lincoln

in the Bardo. He has followed this with a teacherly discussion of seven Russian short stories published more than a century ago, which appear alongside his essays about how they are made. Richard Godwin in the

Times pointed out that it is ‘a quirk of the literary economy that even highly acclaimed, award-winning writers earn more stable incomes teaching others how to write than they do from writing themselves’.

These essays are adapted from a course in Russian short fiction which Saunders has been giving for 20 years to students of creative writing at Syracuse University. ‘I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading back to see what we can steal,’ Saunders writes, before laying down a few rules. ‘Always be escalating,’ is one, illustrated by a line-by-line reading of Chekhov’s In

the Cart. The stories under discussion include two by Tolstoy, one each by Turgenev and Gogol as well as more Chekhov. In the Guardian Tessa Hadley, also a teacher as well as a writer, pointed out that the essays ‘aren’t anything like academic analysis. The questions that get asked in a reading-for-writers class are inflected differently from literary criticism – “Why did the writer do this?” rather than “How must we read this?”’ She praises the book as heralding the opposite of the death of the author: Saunders ‘tracks the author’s intentions – and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious – so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence.’

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman particularly admired Saunders on the reality of editing. ‘This is wise counsel, dealing with the huge number of tiny corrections that add up to replacing almost everything. If you are planning finally to write your novel over lockdown, this isn’t a bad place to start. At least you’ll read seven works of genius.’