Okay, last year didn’t work out, but we keep trying.
Author: George Saunders
Date Published: 2021
Date Read: September 4th 2025
I went into A Swim in a Pond in the Rain a bit misguided. Birthed from one of Saunders’s classes at Syracuse, it was going to be a deconstruction of literature that would teach me how to write. Of course, Saunders waits until the end to rule this out.
One of the dangers of writing a book about writing is that it might be perceived to be of the how-to variety. This book is not that. A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.)
So what is it? Is it, as it is subtitled, a book In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life? I would be hard pressed to defend that. Instead, I think it really is an exploration of what is good. And how, exactly, does one explore what is good? Saunders says
But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it.
So, we subject ourselves to a spectrum and see what gets absorbed and compare that to what Saunders thinks. And boy does Saunders have some bad opinions–afterall, this man claims to like Gogol’s The Nose.
I am convinced (based on no factual data), that were Gogol’s The Nose to have been picked up off the street bearing no authorial mark, they would fine the person responsible for littering. But no, it is considered “an important part of St. Petersburg’s literary tradition”. As Saunders illustrates, it is important to consider the art in context – from translation to the author’s full life and the author’s other works.
Gogol, as it turns out, reads much better in Russian where clever wordplay is obvious and doesn’t get dropped in translation. He’s also really funny in his own right in real life.
In the last ten years of his life, Gogol lost this gift of splitting himself. Or, we might say, the banal man took over entirely. … “Abandoning (or abandoned by) the comic sense that had produced his best works,” Fanger writes, “he comes increasingly to resemble one of his own caricatures.” “O believe my words,” Gogol urged one of his correspondents. “I myself do not dare disbelieve them.” That’s a line that could have come out of the mouth of one of Gogal’s skaz narrators, but, it was written by the man himself, and in earnest.
That line, “O believe my words, I myself do not dare disbelieve them.” is genius. And the kind of respect that line garners from me probably would have motivated me to at least respect some of the bizarreness present in The Nose. After all, the sole reason I picked up A Swim in the first place was because of how much I like Saunders’s writing. I still think about Pastoralia (short story), which I read earlier this year and think is fantastic. And I really enjoyed hearing about the creative forces driving his work–about his work background and his writing history and his approach to writing. All of that context really helps me appreciate The Swim much more than had I approached it ignorant of its author.
I think one of the objections I take to The Nose is that I couldn’t find my footing in the whole story.
Saunders helps to explain why that might be disconcerting.
A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking.
Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism. Every sentence is a little referendum on truth. “True of not?” we keep asking. If our answer is “Yes, seems true,” we get shot out of that little gas station and keep reading.
But I found no such facts that spoke to my truth. On the other hand, I felt Saunders speaking to my truth, even if I didn’t agree with every single one of his opinions.
Some stories–let’s admit it–we read from a sense of duty, the way we walk through a middling local museum; noting things we should feel interested in but aren’t really. Reading such stories, we’re merely reading them.
This discussion of the ‘laws of fiction” is super interesting. As noted,
If you gather ten writers in a room, ranging from the great to the bad, and ask them to put together a list of the prime virtues of fiction, you won’t get much disagreement. It turns out, there is such a list of prime virtues, one we’ve been casually compiling as we’ve worked our way through these Russian stories: Be specific and efficient. Use a lot of details. Always be escalating. Show, don’t tell. And so on.
But I found I wasn’t so interested in these principles as much as I was in the mechanics.
I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading to see what we can steal.
There are three that stick out to me. The first is the use of repetition. While it is obvious in The Darling how repetition is used, Saunders notes that he uses repetition in Pastoralia (short story) through the mechanism of the “Slot” where a goat is delivered, or not, each day. That mechanic gives a cadence to the story and offers a chance to introduce variation in a familiar atmosphere. The next was the couching of preaching in Gooseberries to avoid proselytizing. Take your point and surround it with opposing characters, environments, settings, action. The final one, which sounds the silliest, is how important it is to simply be descriptive. A story is different from a summary. While I love reading to get the jist, the story is more than simply the jist.
But to say that the story is nearly all facts doesn’t mean that Tolstoy is a minimalist. He has a gift for making sentences that, staying within factuality, convey a bounty of information and make a rich, detailed, almost overfull world. Consider the difference between “The main carried to samovar to the table” and Tolstoy’s version: “After flicking with her apron the top of the samovar which was now boiling over, she carried it with an effort to the table, raised it, and set it down with a thud.”
And perhaps the biggest takeaway is that writing is hard.
According to Pevear, Tolstoy wrote the story in one day. When he was done, he didn’t like it. “Wrote Alyosha, very bad,” he recorded in his diary. “Gave it up.”
And that’s okay.
“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. “And it’s a shit-hill.” Then again, that was my name on it.
The critic Dave Hickey has written about this, the notion that saying what art should do might enable a reactionary establishment to start saying what it must do, and then to begin silencing those artists whose works aren’t doing that. In other words, whenever we get up on the soapbox and sing fiction’s praises, explaining how good it is for everyone, we’ve actually limiting its freedom to be. . . whatever it wants to be (perverse, contrary, frivolous, objectionable, useless, too difficult for any but a few to read, and so on).
Author: Calvin Kasulke
Date published: August 31, 2021
Date read: June 4, 2025
Perhaps not the “romp through the haunted house of late-stage capitalism” that one blurb claimed, it certainly might capture the fuzzy, absurd memory of peak pandemic work from home culture that some might have at this point, several years out. Gerald is perpetually wfh, online at all sorts of hours of the day, with nothing better to do than to peruse internal work threads. Living through COVID was kind of like getting trapped in Slack itself, right?
The gimmick could easily overstay its welcome, but the author keeps it short. It is experimental, silly, and bizarre. A kind of creative fever dream that one can appreciate for its creative fever dream properties. And there’s a couple of memorable quips that one can save in their workplace comedy back pocket.
doug smorin
working from home
you’re producing some of your best output in the year you’ve been here
gerald
actually, I’ve been with the company for two years
doug snoring
in that time you’ve produced only a year’s worth of output
at best
gerald
oh
Edited: Michael Lewis
Authors: Michael Lewis and others
Date published: March 18, 2025
Date read: May 29, 2025
I have a friend who works for the government. When talking heads discuss government workers, there are two extremes: the “inefficient, lazy, lucky to have a government job” type and the “giving up a multimillionaire dollar position at a prestigious law/consulting/trading firm to labor for the common good” type. My friend is the latter. Their parents constantly remind them that they could and should be making far more money in the private sector. It’s the kind of perspective that Lewis captures in a profile of Chris Mark, who decided to become a coal miner despite his father’s position as a professor at Princeton.
When his father told a friend of the curious path that Chris had put himself on, the friend had said, “You must be so proud of him.” To which Robert replied, “I’d be proud of him if he was your kid.”
The stories make obvious something that is obvious. Government can solve problems that the private sector can’t. Take Chris, our Princeton son turned coal miner. He spends years to research and write regulations to save coal miners from collapsing roofs. And perhaps too apropos for the book’s broader claim that there are problems that the private sector won’t fix on its own, the critical tool to save lives was not one that needed to be invented. It was one that just needs to be used–roof bolts.
And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury. Taking advantage, essentially, of people conditioned to a certain level of risk by failing to ameliorate that risk. “No one puts people’s lives at risk per se,” Chris said. “It’s not obvious most of the time that people’s lives are at stake. You’re always playing probabilities. But they knew what they were doing. They could see people dying. Even in a union mine they did it. That is what is so extraordinary. These were not dumb guys. This was a conscious decision.”
Roof collapse was a problem that the free market just didn’t want to solve because it got in the way of profits. There was an uneasy equilibrium that had traded lives for money that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, had simply accepted. But not Chris Mark. And, by extension, not the government.
I thought the story of Chris Mark heroic, but I can imagine another conclusion. After all, if coal mining is being phased away in favor of different energy sources, would the resources used to fund Chris Mark have been better used to simply advance green energy, or to fund research into a disease that affects far more people than the small coal mining sector? Is this not evidence that the government is inefficient?
Part of me wants to be able to directly defend this investment in Chris Mark from this critique of efficiency. That, actually, one does not know the future, so one should invest broadly in many areas. That the marginal dollar spent in one area might not move the marginal benefit as much as another. And on and on. But the other stories in the book perhaps remind me that this is the wrong approach. After all, I did not resonate with every single one of the programs that were portrayed. And that might be a point the book is attempting to make by selecting such a diverse set of profiles. The government may save lives, but it isn’t trying to optimize for saving lives. It might look for alien life in the universe, but it is not trying to optimize for that. It might try and comfort the nation’s veterans but it clearly isn’t optimizing for that. Government should be trying to make lives good, for some hotly contestable and elusive definition of good.
And even if it is impossible to define good, it is clear to me that the private sector optimizes for something different–even if the two sometimes align. And I am proud of my friend for believing in the good and I think we are better off for it.