A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain Review

George Saunders has been teaching Russian short fiction at Syracuse University’s MFA program for more than twenty years. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is what that teaching looks like when written down: seven stories — by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol — presented in full, with Saunders’s commentary interspersed through and after each one, asking at every stage what the story is doing and why, and what a writer can learn from watching it do it.

The method Saunders calls reading “in the direction the story is already going.” Rather than arriving with a critical framework and applying it, he reads each story as a reader — attending to what he notices, what he doesn’t notice, where his attention sharpens and where it drifts, what the story makes him want and when it delivers it — and then, retrospectively, asks why the story produced those effects. The result is less a critical analysis than a phenomenology of reading: a record of what it is like to encounter a great story and a set of questions that illuminate what made the experience possible.

The stories selected are calibrated to teach different lessons. Chekhov’s “In the Cart” demonstrates the power of understatement — how much emotional weight a story can carry without ever making it explicit. Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot” shows what happens when a writer refuses to sentimentalise: Alyosha is a simple man whose goodness is rendered with absolute lack of condescension, and the result is devastating precisely because it doesn’t reach for devastation. Gogol’s “The Nose” teaches something entirely different — the way absurdist premises can be inhabited with such internal logic that they become more real than realism.

The book’s deepest argument is about what fiction is for. Saunders argues — through close reading rather than through assertion — that great fiction changes the reader’s consciousness, and that it does this not through the explicit statement of truths but through the experience of being inside a particular sensibility for the duration of a story. The Russian masters are supreme, in his account, because their sensibilities are so fully themselves: they do not simplify their characters, do not make the moral arithmetic easy, do not protect either themselves or the reader from what is actually there. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is the most useful account of how fiction actually works that has been published in recent years, and it is useful in the way that good teaching is useful: it changes how you read everything after.

The Classroom Origin

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain developed from Saunders’s MFA course at Syracuse University, where he has taught Russian short fiction for more than two decades. The book is explicit about this origin, and the origin shapes the book’s method: this is teaching, not criticism. The distinction matters because teaching is interactive and responsive in ways that critical writing is not, and Saunders preserves the interactivity by stopping the stories at regular intervals to ask the reader what they notice and what they want, before proceeding.

This produces a reading experience that is unusual for a book about fiction: the reader is actively invited to have opinions rather than simply to receive them. Saunders’s opinions follow, but they are offered as the opinions of a reader — someone who has read the story carefully and wants to share what he noticed — rather than as critical verdicts. The method is democratic in a specific way that literary criticism rarely is.

The Four Authors

The selection of four Russian authors — Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol — is calibrated to demonstrate different formal strategies rather than to represent Russian literature comprehensively. Chekhov’s stories illustrate understatement and the power of what is not said. Turgenev contributes a meditation on character and the way a life can be suggested through its surface details. Tolstoy demonstrates moral weight achieved without moralism. Gogol provides the case for absurdism — the story that creates its own internal logic and inhabits it with such conviction that the absurdity becomes more real than realism.

Each selection teaches a different lesson, and the lessons accumulate across the book into something like a complete account of what fiction can do. Saunders does not pretend this is a comprehensive survey; the selection is pedagogical, not canonical.

The Method of Escalation

One of the book’s most practically useful insights is the concept of narrative escalation: the idea that every sentence in a story either escalates or de-escalates the story’s energy, and that the writer must understand which is happening and make a conscious choice about it. This is a simpler way of saying what narratologists call “narrative tension,” but Saunders’s formulation is more useful because it is more local — it applies at the sentence level, not just at the structural level, and it gives writers a concrete question to ask of any sentence they have written.

The Russian masters, in Saunders’s reading, are supreme partly because they escalate with precision: every word is load-bearing, every detail earns its place, and the moment when the story arrives at its conclusion has been prepared by everything that preceded it. He demonstrates this through the close reading method, pausing stories before their endings to ask the reader to feel the pressure that has been built, and then showing how the ending releases or redirects that pressure.

Reading as a Practice

The book’s deepest argument is about the purpose of reading — not as the absorption of information or theme, but as the experience of being inside a particular sensibility for the duration of a story. Saunders argues that great fiction changes the reader’s consciousness, not by telling them what to think but by enacting a way of seeing that the reader temporarily inhabits. This is an argument about form: the how of fiction is not separate from the what but is itself the content.

This is why close reading matters, in Saunders’s account: because the effects of fiction are produced by specific formal choices, and to understand those effects you have to understand those choices. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is the most persuasive account of this argument in recent years because it demonstrates the argument rather than merely stating it.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — The best book about how fiction works published in decades, and a master class in the close reading practice that produced one of American fiction’s finest voices.