In 2022, George Saunders published A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book that shared his technique and structure for critical reading and analysis of critical works by a quartet of Russian masters, offering a guide not only to would-be novelists and short fiction writers, but to those of us in a field struggling to find a critical language.Article continues after advertisement
Saunders’s tone in A Swim in a Pond is both gentle and rigorous. He acknowledges that the first encounter with a text is likely to be superficial. We go from the beginning to the end, and we have some idea of what happened to the characters, but we are missing the subtle patterns that make the story larger than its narrative envelope.
The same applies to radio and audio, especially Golden Age radio, which was entirely ephemeral—it had a broadcast window, and then it disappeared. Happily, today’s media environment permits the recovery and re-engagement with these works, which reveal astonishing subtlety and intent in the face of rigid deadlines and the commercially sponsored context in which they were produced and broadcast.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain suggests that Russian literature is “beyond category” a term first used to describe jazz great Duke Ellington.
