This is an amazingly conceived and written book for any writer (or reader) of short fiction. Like many thousands of people, I love to write and sometimes try my hand at fiction. I wish that I’d had this book some decades earlier.

George Saunders is a prolific, prize winning writer in multiple genres and a Professor of Writing at Syracuse University. The first half of this book’s title refers to an ecstatic swim described by Anton Chekhov in his story, “Goosberries”. Saunders is a lover of Russian writing, so one could guess that Chekhov’s swimmer experiences in the water is what Saunders takes from the stories of Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy. 

This book contains seven stories, written by these authors, that Saunders considers masterworks of short fiction. More importantly each story is accompanied by an essay in which Saunders dissects the story to explain how the pieces are put together to make each a masterpiece. I for one believe that his analyses succeed. The stories are masterpieces, which is not to say they would receive acceptances in very many of today’s literary magazines. Finally, Saunders writes in clear, unadorned English, eschewing the jargon of editors, writing teachers and others. His voice is personal and friendly. I can imagine what a great teacher he must be.

So, let’s take just one example story to provide a flavor of the book. It is Nikolai Gogol’s story, The Nose. Here’s a story summary. Ivan the barber awakens in the morning, cuts his loaf of bread in two and finds, in the bread, a nose, one he recognizes as belonging to a customer, Kovalyov, whom he shaves twice a week. He wraps the nose in cloth and, barely avoiding the police, throws it in a river. 

Kovalyov awakes to find his nose missing, “… and flew off straight to the chief of police.” On the street, a carriage draws up and a uniformed gentleman alights. The narrator informs, “Imagine the horror … of Kovalyov when he recognizes that it was his own nose!” Kovalyov confronts the gentleman who is his nose and who understands nothing of what Kovalyov is saying, “Make yourself more clear,” the gentleman says. Kovalyov is perplexed by the gentleman’s inability to understand, “After all, you are my own nose.” Later Kovalyov is rejected in his attempt to advertise the loss of his nose in the newspaper. Later still, a police officer appears at Kovalyov’s door, “Did you happen to mislay your nose?” “That’s right.” “It has been recovered… about to board a stagecoach …” Various measures to re-attach the nose fail, but upon awakening on the morning of April 7th the nose re-appears, “… between Kovalyov’s cheeks.” 

At this point, for me at least, there is real suspense. How is Saunders going to make the case that this is a great piece of short fiction? The title Saunders gives to his “Thoughts on the Nose” is, “The Door to the Truth Might be Strangeness?”

Is this story “true?” How could it be? As a philosopher, I know truth to be what happens when the real world is as some language claims that it is. Truth is a correspondence between a claim in language about the world and how the world is. But, let’s say that what I describe is empirical truth. What other kinds are there?

A man I know was a combat artist in Vietnam. One of his drawings is of a Vietnamese child, eyes and mouth wide in horror. Not a particular child at a specific place or time. It wouldn’t make sense to ask, “Did that child live?” But I expect that people who shared the artist’s combat experiences would agree, “There’s truth in that drawing.” Part of that truth would be in the experience it creates in those who see it.

Saunders compares “consensus reality”, what does not surprise us or appear impossible, with situations that transgress what is expected or considered possible, strange events (Have you thought of Kafka, of “Metamorphosis?). A strange world can have rules, expectations, what Saunders calls, “a psychological physics” that resembles our world. A story can have meaning, be truthful, Saunders writes, “… not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premise – by what it does with it. This happens in “The Nose.” 

Consider the narrator. His contradictions abound. The barber is, “…in many ways a respectable man… “He’s a drunk, we’re told (the narrator gossips.) and dresses badly, and his hands stink.”  The narrator pontificates, “Utterly nonsensical things happen in the world… how is it that Kovalyov did not know that one does not advertise for one’s nose through the newspaper office? … this is something I can understand … [But] after all, where aren’t there incongruities in the world?” It’s as if the narrator is making excuses for not doing the job. We rely upon narrators to pull things together, to make sense of what happens. How did the nose get into the bread? Off Kovalyov’s face? What did the nose look like as the well-dressed gentleman? Does the nose have a face? A nose? We hear nothing of this. Saunders notes, “The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz, attempting intelligence and clarity, but achieving pedantry and confusion, “Sacha Baron Cohen doing Borat,” as Saunders  notes. 

What does all this mean? Saunders writes, “The meaning of a story in which something impossible happens is not that it happened … but in the way the story reacts to what happened.” In this story, Saunders noted, when something happens people either don’t notice or misunderstand it. 

There is a common claim about stories that a character must face a barrier and be transformed by its overcoming or by a failure to do so. In this story Kovalyov loses his nose, searches, fails to find it, and has it returned without explanation. Saunders ask how Kovalyov was changed by these trials. The answer is, he was not. A physical event happens, its importance is social – Kovalyov covers the absence of his nose with his handkerchief when with others, the nose returns and life goes on.

The assistance that the reader or writer gets from Saunders is not in the form of instruction or explanation, but in the questions he asks. Like wandering a rain forest with a botanist who asks, “Do you see how the spider captures its moth? Why do you think the web is constructed in just this way? Did you notice that trees in crowded spaces are straighter? In this case we have a story. Check out how it is presented. How do the people interact? Why are its mysterious happenings not explained? How do people respond to them? Why does no one say, “This mysterious thing cannot happen.” Do you see the contradictions? How do the characters resemble other people we know of? This is a wonderful book.

John Mullen is a philosopher and writer living in Dresden, Maine. His novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers, Swallow Tail Press, appeared in 2017. His widely read book, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age, was published by Mentor/Penguin. Two of his recent stories are “In Father’s Eyes”, Fiction on the Web, 2017 and “The Passing of Days” in Everyday Fiction, 2020.

Categories: Fiction

Keywords: fiction