George Saunders Conducts a Cheery Class on Fiction’s Possibilities - The New York Times

Take George Saunders.

He made his name with his antic short stories — fables, really — thronged with suicides, amputations, broken men: “the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business.” In 2017, he published his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” set during the Civil War and narrated by a chorus of restless ghosts.

The desperate, botched rescue operation is a common feature in Saunders’s work, and his fiction itself has the feeling of a rescue operation — on us, the reader.

These particular hopes have never been more precisely, joyfully or worryingly articulated than in his new book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” an analysis of seven classic Russian short stories.

If there are few more treacherous places to turn up than as a character in a George Saunders story — he might have you slapping yourself in the face with your own amputated hand, as he condemns one miserable case — there might be no cushier place than to be a student in his classroom.

The new book emerges from his longtime course on the 19th-century Russian short story — on Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol.

The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish,” Saunders writes.

“The aim of this book is mainly diagnostic: If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that?”.

The book might provoke comparisons to Nabokov’s classic lectures on Russian literature, first delivered at Cornell.

There’s no charge I’ve made here that Saunders hasn’t made himself

In the section on Chekhov’s “The Darling,” Saunders writes that the story seems to ask us to sit in judgment of the character, to ask, “Is this trait of hers good or bad?” Chekhov, he tells us, answers: “Yes.”