A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it.

Even before there’s a person in the story, there’s an implied tension between two elements of the narrative voice, one telling us that things are lovely (the sky is “marvelous” and “immeasurably deep”) and another resisting the general loveliness.

So, I didn't perceive the dichotomy as "resisting the general loveliness"! The boundaries between seasons are themselves delightful. The chill of snow in the shadows is a wonderful contrast with the fresh green of foliage and the warm blue sky. Perhaps this is because winter isn't threatening; I live in a time and place that has removed that danger. That wasn't true in this story's time, and our author still feels that way, I suppose.

The story has said of her, “She is unhappy and can’t imagine any other life for herself.” And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like “Well, we’ll see about that.”

As a reader, what else would you like to know?

Obviously, why bored? But that's Russia. What I'm really curious about is whoever else is in "they". Until I was reminded, I thought she was alone.

Notice that, in spite of the fact that we are literary sophisticates, engaged in a deep reading of a Chekhov masterpiece, we feel the sudden appearance of Hanov to be a potential nineteenth-century Russian meet-cute: A lonely schoolteacher runs into a wealthy landowner, who, we feel, might transform her depressing life.

I spotted that possibility, but also that he might be a threat. Maybe he has ideas about what she should be teaching, or whether a woman is fit for the job.

he’s taking this long drive through the mud to visit a friend,

Why would we assume Bakvist is a friend?

Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows.

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself.

only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna

Hey, even I can see the symbolic parallel here. The cart horse is struggling with tough terrain! Maybe it isn't up to hauling that cart?

Just imagine the many Maryas who have existed, all over the world, their best selves sacrificed to exigency, whose grace suffered under the pressure of being poorly suited to the toil required of them to make a living. (Maybe, like me, you’ve been one of them yourself.)

Yeah, maybe. Ha ha.

In workshop we sometimes say that what makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever. (That’s a bit Draconian, but let’s go with it as a starting place.)

As long as there’s love, there’ll be people who aren’t loved.

He hardly ever drank, had no dealings with women, and was passionately fond of singing.

I remember once seeing in the evening, at low tide, a great white seagull on the flat sandy shore of the sea which was roaring away dully and menacingly in the distance: it was sitting motionless, its silky breast turned toward the scarlet radiance of sunset, only now and then spreading out its long wings toward the familiar sea, toward the low, blood-red sun; I remembered that bird as I listened to Yashka.

What’s Kafka going to do with that? Your reading state has been affected. You are, let’s say, “beginning to resist.” You have “registered a mild objection.” But we readers will tolerate all kinds of reading states, even negative-seeming ones: periods of boredom, of perplexity, periods during which we are really hating Character X and wondering if the writer knows just how much.

What we are saying, essentially, is: “Well, Franz, that bug thing is excessive but I’m going to allow it. Proceed. What are you going to do with that thing I couldn’t help noticing? I hope you’re going to make it pay off.”

our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

Lynda Barry

!

So, one way to approach a story—to evaluate how good it is, how graceful and efficient—is to ask, “What is the heart of you, dear story?” (Or, channeling Dr. Seuss, “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)

If I say: “Two guys got in a fight in a bar across from my house and, guess what? One of them won!”—that’s not meaningful. What would make it meaningful is knowing who those guys were.

The whole experience of reading fiction might be understood as a series of “establishings” (“the dog is sleeping”), stabilizations (“he is really sleeping deeply, so deeply that the cat just managed to walk across his back”), and alterations (“Uh-oh, he woke up”).

We might, at this point, recall some earlier birds in the story, those “doleful” rooks and crows, those “fighting” sparrows. This seagull is a freer species of bird, far from this crummy, sweltering little town, out in some cool, clean ocean air.

I demur re the corvids. Humans might be impoverished and miserable, but the ravens and crows are above that. They're laughing at humans, with their pathetic sensitivities. Those blessed with wings can fly to the treetops, to a distant meadow; they hang around humans because we provide them with amusement and food, mostly due to our incompetence with nature.

Because I’m a former engineer,

!

Part of Turgenev’s self-understood function here is reportage; he’s a kind of adventure journalist, giving his readers a glimpse into an exotic world, a world located beneath them.

That is why these side characters must be described: so that when they react, we’ll know what those reactions mean, which to credit and which to discount; through them, he creates a sort of ascending ladder of credibility.

(If you can’t bear to cut the Turgenev, try the exercise provided in Appendix A, in which I’ll ask/allow you to severely cut something I’ve written for that purpose.)

So, we feel the story to be saying something about technical proficiency vs. emotional power, and coming down in favor of the latter. It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven.

pretty great craft.

https://lithub.com/on-the-short-stories-that-inspired-a-russian-czar-to-free-the-serfs/

Let’s say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing

This is a silly analogy.

“Yep, Mr. Nabokov is right as usual, even though he hasn’t even been born yet: my literary genius does fall short on the score of naturally discovering ways of telling the story which would equal the originality of my descriptive art. But what am I supposed to do?”

It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.

“Well, yes, it is a shit-hill, but it’s my shit-hill, so let me assume that if I continue to work in this mode that is mine, this hill will eventually stop being made of shit, and will grow, and from it, I will eventually be able to see (and encompass in my work) the whole world.”

So: a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (lather, rinse, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts, over months or even years.

But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided. When I’m writing well, there’s almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on.

he would have found, as today, that some of his audience was dozing off or sneaking out of the cave early, in that crouching posture people adopt when sneaking out of a literary event, as if crouching like that will make them invisible to the author, which, believe me, it doesn’t.

Ha ha.

Again: do we really “notice” these things the first time we read the story? I sure didn’t, back when I read it for the first time. But we notice them now, as we analyze the story.

But who *analyzes* stories?!?