A magnificent reader reading. ( )

If you have any interest in writing, and reading like a master naturalist would read the signs of the forest, then this a must read. Saunders knows the way. ( )

Back when the part of the pandemic where stores were closed, my favorite bookstore allowed people to book appointments for a half hour of shopping and I jumped on the chance to finally see the top part of a good friend's face as we bought more books than planned, out of an excess of joy at being out in the world for a short time. At the time this book had just been published and I eyed the book for several minutes before deciding to wait for the paperback. I will gleefully mark up a paperback, but will not so much as dog-ear the page of a hardcover, and this felt like a book I would want to at least underline a few passages.

I was right about it, this is a book that invites the reader to interact with it, to draw conclusions, to highlight sentences, and to tab the spots where they will want to return. Saunders presents seven short stories by Russian authors and then takes the reader through what the author was doing and how he did it. Along the way, there is discussion about everything from the predictable lessons on characterization and plotting, to how translation affects a work, to how a story might transcend the author's intentions.

I was reading other books as I worked my way through this and I found myself choosing short story collections and reading those stories differently, with a greater appreciation for the skill involved in making a character, or several characters, immediately an individual, and how the beats of a story are spaced and structured. Saunders is a gifted and generous teacher and I'm glad to have expanded my skills as a reader. I can see myself rereading this book in a few years. ( )

(I first must say that I started just skimming over Saunders’ commentaries in the back half of the book for reasons expressed below - I did read all the stories)

My feelings on this book exist on three levels:

First level: the highest praise I can give to Saunders is that he picked these stories well. All of them were mysteriously beautiful and affecting, and all of them accomplished in the highest degree what I think is the defining trait of great art, namely expressing a feeling or an idea that simply could not have been expressed any other way. At the end of Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” I couldn’t help but curse under my breath at the mastery and elegance of the thing, at sat down my phone for a few minutes just to think about what I read. If this book was just these stories, it would be five stars.

Second level: This is where I get petty. Saunders packs his “reflections” that follow each story with page after page of corny metaphors and “analysis” that’s as thick as frozen oatmeal. I was shocked to hear that every year he teaches Turgenev’s “Singers” his students complain that there is too much digression in the story. These aren’t undergrads either, but MFA in creative writing candidates; how could you gain admission to such a competitive program and still have such a dense and untenable opinion? Perhaps Saunders has been conditioned by these experiences to be a little gun-shy, to feel as if he has to serve as an apologist for ancient text that most readers won’t understand. He’s constantly trying to prove to us that these stories are good, but in doing so he resorts to all kinds of hackneyed language in what I can only imagine is an attempt to make the text more relatable. The end result is something like the explanation of a joke: many readers might, through his after thoughts, develop a greater appreciation for the “craftsmanship” of the joke, but they will never laugh; for those of us who are laughing already, it’s redundant and deeply lame.

Third level: All in all, I find this book to be a quintessential document of the rotting carcass of institutional education in America. What we have here is an accomplished author entering the world of college academia with the purported goal of teaching creativity. His students pay large sums of money to dissect and dismember great works of art in the name of a most self obsessed goal- becoming a great writer themselves. The true meaning of the work is lost when it is turned into a “strategy” or a “technique” to be mined. All of this stems from the modern rot brought about by the professionalization and institutionalization of art and education. Saunders technique as espoused in this book turns the mystical and unnamable process of creation into another quantifiable mode of production. In the same way, the MFA programs churn out homogenized graduates with mountains of debt and nothing gained except a vulture’s eye for “what makes a story work”.
It seems to me that the greatest criticism of this mode of thinking is baked right into the biographies of the great Russian writers that serve as the foundation for this book: did Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, or Turgenev go to creative writing classes? This book exists as a totem to the narcissism underlying all of society: Saunders wants to make us better writers, when it would do us much more good to become better readers instead. ( )

The apparently simple aim of this book is the study of “trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.” This is, as anyone who has tried it knows, is anything but simple. To this end, George Saunders uses the great Russian writers as examples. Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol. Those guys.

It’s an unusual type of writing book because Saunders doesn’t tell you how to write. He shows you how these guys did it, talks about the stories, and then advocates listening to yourself. Basically trusting the voice inside that “really, really knows what it likes.” ( )