That word “craft” is important to Saunders and the FIC because it suggests that, like a mechanic or carpenter, the writing of fiction can be systematized and taught.
Saunders approaches these writers with the eye not of a scholar or critic, but of a craftsperson. That is, then, what this book would seem to be about: the short story as a form and how to write it. “All the bedrock principles are on display,” he writes. Why these writers? Why these stories? Saunders compares the study of these stories for the young writer to the study of Bach for the young composer. This is far enough back that Saunders doesn’t feel the need to deal with too much historical messiness – though he alludes to the revolution that would sweep the country a few decades after these writers as if he were a director foreshadowing the appearance of a horror-film boogeyman – and thus, these stories float free and unattached from the world in which they were produced.Ī Swim in a Pond in the Rain pares down the scope of Saunders’ class and focuses on seven stories by four writers: Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders brings that course to the page, with dire results.īy “The Russians,” Saunders means mostly 19th century writers (though, in the class, he includes some 20th century writers) of short stories from that country. The latter – something like a kindly uncle of contemporary fiction – has for some years been teaching at Syracuse University a class on “The Russians” that has garnered a near-mythic reputation. Only two prominent counter-examples leap to mind: the Nobel-winning Canadian Alice Munro and the American George Saunders. The form is rarely enough to stake a literary career on. That is, the network of MFA writing programs and literary magazines where the form is studied, practiced, published and which has produced a huge number of American writers of fiction over the last few decades. But on the other hand, short stories constitute the lifeblood (or, more crassly, the currency) of what might be called the Fiction Industrial Complex (FIC). Either as discreet units or collected into books, stories are certainly less-read than, say, online articles, or novels. On the one hand, you will often hear it said that no one reads them.
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