{"id":5779,"date":"2021-02-12T17:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T22:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=5779"},"modified":"2021-02-12T15:00:08","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T20:00:08","slug":"book-review-a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=5779","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Jasey Roberts<\/em><\/p>\n

In January, acclaimed short story writer and novelist George Saunders released a new nonfiction piece, \u201cA Swim in a Pond in the Rain\u201d – a book that is part-literary criticism, part-writing guide and, as with much of his work, part-manual for living a better life.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, Saunders has been a professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse University\u2019s M.F.A. program – the same program that has been taught by the likes of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.\u00a0 In \u201cA Swim,\u201d Saunders attempts to compress a semester\u2019s course load of analysis into an incredibly detailed close reading of six 19th-century Russian short stories, written by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. These are writers that Saunders openly loves and stands by. \u201cFor a young writer, reading the Russian stories of this period is akin to a young composer studying Bach,\u201d he states in the book\u2019s introduction. The stories themselves range from brief to novella-length, from funny to depressing and from realistic to surprisingly experimental.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Early on, Saunders introduces concepts such as the \u201cRuthless Efficiency Principle,\u201d or \u201cREP.\u201d \u201c[N]othing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function,\u201d he states. \u201cEvery element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story\u2019s purpose.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Saunders then goes on to select stories like Turgenev\u2019s \u201cThe Singers,\u201d which is, at a glance, a story that is meandering and that very literally serves a \u201cdocumentary function.\u201d Saunders acknowledges this and instead of regarding it as an outlier to his previous rule, moves to dissect which parts of the story worked and which parts didn\u2019t. He invites the reader to approach each of these stories with an open mind – to always take a diagnostic approach and to keep putting things in their \u201cThings I Couldn\u2019t Help Noticing\u201d basket.<\/span><\/p>\n

When speaking about Freytag\u2019s Triangle (the plot diagram that goes: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), Saunders writes, \u201cIt\u2019s an after-the-fact construction that won\u2019t necessarily help us write a story, but it can help us analyze one that\u2019s already up and running or diagnose one that isn\u2019t.\u201d \u201cA Swim,\u201d in many ways, serves that very same purpose. Aside from the three writing exercises in the Appendix (which are as unconventional as they are useful), Saunders isn\u2019t attempting to teach the reader how to write but is rather teaching them how to think about writing. It is a must-read for fans of his work, for fans of the short story and for people who think they might like to write them.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Jasey Roberts In January, acclaimed short story writer and novelist George Saunders released a new nonfiction piece, \u201cA Swim in a Pond in the Rain\u201d – a book that is part-literary criticism, part-writing guide and, as with much of his work, part-manual for living a better life. For decades, Saunders has been a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":5780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-5779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-summer2019"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Book-review-pic-option-2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}