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

George Saunders is a writer of surreal, often dystopian fiction. His stories frequently explore the effects of capitalism on contemporary American life, and are set in worlds that are only slightly exaggerated versions of reality. His story “Pastoralia,” for example (from his 2000 collection, Pastoralia) is set in a prehistoric-themed park, with one of the cavemen actors in the park doing the narrating. Another story that was made into a 2022 film, “Escape from Spiderhead” (from his 2010 Tenth of December collection) is about prisoners serving as guinea pigs in an experimental science program.

Although the plots and settings of his stories are often bleak, Saunders is both parodic and funny and also, at the same time, earnestly interested in themes of faith and redemption in his work. At the end of “Escape from Spiderhead,” the teenaged narrator manages to escape his prison by deliberately overdosing a drug that he has been given, one intended to produce psychotic, violent feelings. Yet in dying, the narrator is flooded with sensations of love and tenderness for the world. The scene has an almost religious aura, as an omniscient benevolent force seems to be speaking through the narrator. In his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker prize in 2005, Saunders explores similar territory, this time focusing on the afterlife. “Bardo” is a Buddhist term for the state of a soul that is in between death and reincarnation; the novel imagines President Abraham Lincoln spending a night in a graveyard mourning his son Willie who has died of typhoid fever, while surrounded by generation of the dead who refuse to accept that their lives have ended.

In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Saunders states that the Russian writers in this book are practicing a form of resistance literature: “The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind” (11). Saunders’s own writing can likewise be seen as resisting what he calls our “degraded era” (12). At the same time his work, like the work of these Russian writers, rests on an optimistic idea of the vastness and potential of a single human being. (For more about this idea of resistance literature, see Writing as a Political Act in the Themes section of the guide.)

Saunders maintains a self-effacing attitude, both as a writer and as a teacher. He describes himself in this book’s introduction as “a vaudevillian” rather than a scholar, and in the book’s ending chapter cautions aspiring writers not to take his advice too seriously (12). While his humility may seem at odds with his ambition, it in fact enables it. According to Saunders, a writer needs to think small, write line by line and avoid worrying about the story’s “original conception” (390). Only in this way will a writer successfully reach a reader. (For more about this conception of writing, see Writing Advice in the Themes section of the guide.)