I have been slow to migrate those old reviews to the new webpage because I want to edit them, correct spelling and grammar errors, etc. It is possible that some were marginal enough that I will never repost them. I have also been adding new reviews that were never on WorldCat. The new webpage now has over one hundred reviews. It is, as always, at: A Collection of Book Reviews Originally Written for WorldCat.
Below is a new review that I wrote this spring and which is on the revised webpage.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In which four Russians give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York : Random House, 2021.
This book purports to be a master class given by four Russians on "writing, reading, and life." One thing that George Saunders does in the book is explain how he himself goes about writing a short story. He also offers close analyses of seven Russian short stories from the late 19th century, a time which was a high point of Russian liberal culture. In the process, he presents his own vision for the value of literature in general. He uses as a pretended conceit that the Russians are teaching the class, which they are not. Although Saunders strenuously rejects the idea that he is writing a "how to" manual for writers, the overarching theme of the book is a "how to," or rather, "this is how I did it, here are the principles that I think are important, and you can figure out your own way."
Saunders agrees with George Eliot, Jamil Zaki, and others that the purpose of literature is to expand our empathy to all people. These 19th century Russian short stories are fairly domestic, but he argues that they are part of a resistance literature which defends the (liberal) ideal that everyone is worthy of attention. He states that readers are a vast underground network for good in the world. Reading makes them more expansive, generous people.
Ironically, Saunders almost immediately contradicts his own vision just stated that literature makes us better people. He notes that the Nazis were skilled at using pageantry to promote their values, and he admits that art can have a dangerous propaganda value. I agree with his latter position that art can be dangerous, but I would frame it to say that literature plays a role in establishing cultural norms. It gets you to connect to a culture through your emotions. For example, Dante's Divine Comedy helped define what it was to be an Italian in the medieval era.
Saunders' own vision--that literature is a force of good in the world and makes us better people--is itself a cultural norm. His writings promote a number of cultural norms. To take one aspect of his writing as an example, the sexual norms in his fiction would not be welcome in more restrictive societies. I would not call his stories especially raunchy, but his books would not be shelved in the Amish fiction section. (I grew up in an area that was heavily Amish and Mennonite. I have been told, but might have the details wrong, that the public library there recently had a specific aisle for Amish fiction. Amish and Mennonite women were forbidden by their communities from checking out fiction that was not from that aisle.)
Saunders is in the delicate position of being a white male in an academic culture that, on average, skews to the left on political and social issues--a culture that sometimes casts a jaundiced eye on white males. He is holding up the work of these dead white males as Great Literature at a time when many adherents of Critical Theory argue that that is wrong. As I interpret it, critical theory argues that we should have a post-colonial and post-defined-sexuality and post-science (antiphysis) and post-religious attitude toward viewing the world in general and literature in particular. Praising the Great Writers is not part of the programme.
Saunders sees literature as asking big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What are we supposed to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth anyway? Why read literature? Saunders argues that the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world. It can deceive us, but it can be trained to accuracy.
This is a vision of literature as universalistic. On the one hand, some theologians might argue that these questions should be left to religion. On the other hand, some critical theorists see this sort of universal position as propping up a privileged group. They ask: who is being held up as the universal man? Saunders gives a nod to critical theory by arguing that Chekhov structured his stories, such as "Gooseberries," so that pronouncements and positions are destabilized. "Destabilized" is a good term in critical theory; it is almost as good as terms such as defamiliarize or de-reify. By presenting his ideas as "just my way of doing it," and focusing on techniques for writing rather than criteria for what counts as Great Literature, Saunders dodges the thrust of critical theory.
In one instance, though, Saunders makes a rather strange and questionable argument that sexism and discrimination based on social class can be translated into bad technique. According to this perspective, if Tolstoy hadn't been so blindly privileged in his attitudes towards the peasants, his stories would have been better. Saunders can then say, hey, it's not all about race, class, and gender; it can be reduced to an argument about good technique and bad technique. You can still enjoy the dead white males who had good technique and therefore had good universalistic values.
By focusing on the Russian writers of the 19th century, Saunders may be setting up a lesson about the excesses of revolutionary culture. Today's critical theory is related to Marxism, and, as Saunders points out, what destroyed all those sensitive readers of the Russian Renaissance were the Bolsheviks--Marxists who took them out and shot them. Saunders doesn't name current critical theorists, but one might infer that this aside is a cautionary tale.
On the surface, Saunders focuses on techniques, such as "maintain specificity," "always be escalating," etc., but he sneaks in praise for the sensitivity and understanding of these writers he showcases. Chekhov was wise about loneliness. Gogol was wise about the role of language in constructing our inner world. This is a book that praises the wisdom and universalist ideals of the Great Masters, even if it slips those assessments in under the guise of a technical discussion.
In his own writing process, Saunders starts with any idea, then subjects his current draft to intensive revision. To him, this technique allows his unconscious sense of the story to come out through a thousand micro-decisions. He just follows the inner voice and lets it take him where it wants to go. He does not like the idea of mapping out a plot; rather, a story creates questions which need to be resolved. When he began as a writer, he wanted to write in a spare, realist style like Hemingway, but he discovered that his most effective writing was in a comic, absurdist style. His advice: find your most effective style, even if it is not what you hoped it would be.
Saunders argues that you need to get people to want to read your work. It has to be interesting enough sentence by sentence for them to keeping reading and satisfying enough in the end for them to start the next story. This vision suggests that the art should follow the reader rather than the reader follow the art, and it seems to encourage the would-be writer to chase after the tastes of the broadest audiences, whether they were the readers of pulp fiction a century ago or the followers of click-bait today.
Of course, readers who follow cultural leaders are more inclined to read what those leaders promote, and in that way, the art can lead the reader. Saunders leads us to these wise Russians. The editors at The New Yorker led their readers to Saunders. As for myself, I would never have read The Friends of Eddie Coyle by Higgins if it had not been suggested by someone whose opinions I respect.
At the end of the book, Saunders humorously disavows that his advice is authoritative. What he seems to be saying is: "This is how I do it, ... just sayin'. ... But I am successful and well-respected, and I learned at the hands of other successful and respected writers such as Tobias Wolff. Just sayin'." He insists that his entire book be bracketed by the words, "According to George." In this way, he can influence the reading public and preserve traditional aesthetic values without appearing to impose them and without being skewered by those who reject the canon.
I like the book. That having been said, I will destabilize my judgment by pointing out that Saunders needed an editor to cut the length. He doesn't give one metaphor for the writing process, he gives dozens. If I had been reading instead of listening to the e-audiobook version, I might have been more frustrated by the repetition ad nauseum. Take your own advice, man: always be escalating!
