A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
By George Saunders
Random House, 2021

 When last we met George Saunders, we were set down in Washington D.C.’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the site of his Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017. Bardo finds a grieving Abraham Lincoln, in February 1862, roaming the graveyard at night in the wake of his son Willie’s death. The novel’s depiction of a president in anguish—both for his son and for his warring nation—is touchingly humane, as is the narration by the novel’s two ghostly protagonists (one of whom has a “tremendous member” and died before he could consummate his marriage) who linger in the cemetery.

Like much of Saunders’s fiction, Bardo uses an idiosyncratic premise to say something disarmingly life-affirming. Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse and is known primarily for his short stories. (Bardo is his only proper novel.) His latest work, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a different sort of book entirely: a collection of seven classic Russian short stories, reproduced here in full and paired with Saunders’s own commentaries on the stories and the writer’s craft.

Saunders guides us, as if we were sitting in his classroom, through works by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol. “I offer the English translations,” he writes by way of introduction, “that I’ve responded to most strongly or, in some cases, the versions I first found years ago and have been teaching from since.” More to the point: “If my goal was to get a non-reader to fall in love with the short story, these are among the stories I’d offer her.”

The first piece here is Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” published in 1897. To start, Saunders takes a “page at a time” approach, following each page of Chekhov’s text with a strand of his own explanation.

The plot of “In the Cart” is simple enough: Marya Vasilyevna, a schoolteacher who remembers little of her family and early life, travels with her driver on a muddy road back to her home village. Along the way, she laments her dead-end teaching career; admires a handsome man—an alcoholic school examiner—who they encounter on the road; and stops at a teahouse full of abrasive drunks. At the start of the final page, she remains as forlorn as she’d been for the majority of the journey—until a glimpse of a woman on a train reminds her of her mother, suddenly conjuring hidden memories of her past life.

A tale very Chekhovian in its particulars. But what makes it a great story? Saunders homes in on the notion of “escalation,” a recurring theme throughout this volume. At the end of “In the Cart,” Marya’s negative appraisal of her life is suddenly, if briefly, upended. (“And with amazing distinctiveness,” Chekhov writes, “for the first time in those thirteen years, she imagined vividly her mother, her father, her brother, their apartment in Moscow.”) Saunders sees this escalation in Marya’s perception of her life as a narrative capstone that gives the story its vibrancy. “Having recalled those memories,” Saunders writes, “Marya is literally not the same person she was just seconds before.”

The Syracuse professor offers similar observations throughout the book, instilling the collected fictions with a new layer of richness. That said, taking these stories a “page at a time,” as the author himself acknowledges, is a bit tedious. I, for one, was glad that for the rest of the way, Saunders saves his comments for afterwards.

The spiritual highmark here, unsurprisingly, is by Tolstoy, whose “Master and Man” (1895) describes a wealthy landowner and a peasant who get stuck in the snow. Saunders performs an exegesis of Tolstoy’s writing style, observing that, despite his penchant for broad moral judgments, Tolstoy writes mainly in facts. “When Tolstoy recounts the thoughts and feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences.” So it is that we become intimate with the two principles of “Master and Man,” Vasili Andreevich and his laborer Nikita.

Saunders credits Tolstoy’s ability to inhabit the various personae of his story. By so minutely depicting the differing worldviews of characters, Tolstoy can enhance the emotional payoff, which in his work normally coincides with a character’s spiritual awakening. Toward the end of “Master and Man,” the status-conscious, money-obsessed Vasili abandons Nikita in the snow, only to find him again, and then sacrifice his own life protecting him from the cold.

Saunders brings his own humanist sensibility to these stories. Part of the beauty of “Master of Man,” he argues, is its proof of the ultimate goodness of Vasili. In having Vasili perform this final, heroic act, Saunders writes, “Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.”

Great fiction, Saunders seems to be saying, has the power to enhance our love for our fellow man. In a similar vein, we finish Chekhov’s “In the Cart” with a feeling of affection for Marya, whose life, in spite of the flash of inspiration she feels toward the end, remains unfulfilling. “Next time you hear someone described as ‘lonely,’ ” Saunders concludes, “you may, because of your friendship with Marya, find yourself more inclined to think of that person tenderly, even though you haven’t met her yet.”

One of the more entertaining riffs here dissects Gogol’s “The Nose.” The 1836 story is absurd on its face: a Petersburg barber finds a nose hidden in a loaf of bread at the breakfast table, and later a civil officer wakes up to discover his nose is missing from his face, only to encounter the nose in human form in a church. But it’s more than the details that are preposterous. Something seems off about the way the story itself is being told.

Throughout “The Nose,” the narrator goes on tangents that don’t add anything useful and seems blind to the structural absurdities inherent to the story. But this is no accident, Saunders writes. Instead, it’s emblematic of “a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz.” Saunders quotes the critic Robert Maguire, who observes that the Gogolian skaz narrator typically “has little formal education and little idea of how to develop an argument, let alone talk in an eloquent and persuasive way about his feelings, although he wishes to be considered informed and observant.” For Gogol, this supposed inability to tell a story well is intentional: “A great writer writing a graceless writer writing,” in Saunders’s formulation. He likens the approach, insightfully, to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character and Dwight Schrute from “The Office.”

Rounding out this collection are Chekhov’s “The Darling” and “Gooseberries,” Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot” and Turgenev’s “The Singers.” (For those who lament the absence of Dostoyevsky, Alex Christofi’s unorthodox biography is more than worth the time). Each is an exemplar of the form. Saunders’s tone remains charmingly self-deprecating, as he probes these stories’ merits both in composition and philosophical content. Above all, he pours his ever-generous heart into his readings, often revealing hidden threads of humor and compassion.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain—the title comes from a scene in Chekhov’s brilliant “Gooseberies”—would be worth owning if only to have all seven stories in a single volume. Yet beyond that, George Saunders has written a loving tribute not only to the giants of Russian literature, not just to the short story, but to fiction itself.

Benjamin Shull is a writer and editor in Park Slope, Brooklyn.