I’m making the book look revoltingly technical. It is not. Saunders lives on synapses – he looks at all the minute and meaningful decisions that produce a sentence, a paragraph, a convincing character. It offers one of the most accurate and beautiful descriptions of what it is like to be inside the writer’s mind that I have read – that state of heightened alertness, quick decisions like lightning.
The book may provoke comparisons with Nabokov’s classic lectures on Russian literature, first presented at Cornell. But where Nabokov is all prose and detached, presiding over his pulpit, Saunders is at his side, giving a shell of praise – “my good-hearted soldier”, he addresses us.
I don’t think I’ve ever been called a soldier before. I’m not sure I like this.
It is here that I must admit that I can find myself in a kind of occasional bard on Saunders, torn between admiration and caution. The breadth of his belief in fiction is inspiring – and suspiciously flattering to the reader. “There is a vast underground network of goodness at work in the world,” he writes. “A network of people who put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive and generous.”
Well, I am a champion of fiction as interested in myself as anyone, but such exaggeration does no favors to form – at best it seems naive, at worst, deeply solipsist. Is the invasion of Iraq better understood as a “literary failure”, as Saunders wrote? Can racism be described as an “anti-literary impulse”?
I suspect that Saunders is too advanced spiritually to read his criticisms. If you did, however, I imagine you may be radiant. “Good little soldier,” he could say.
I have made no accusations here that Saunders has not made himself. “I’m an idiot Pollyanna type,” he said. “I like to find hope, sometimes in an irritating way: ‘Oh, I have a nail in my head. It’s great, I’ll hang up a coat, it’ll be good. ‘”
And it is exactly that kind of ambiguity in thought that he reifies, and that fiction, he tells us, makes it possible.
In the section on Chekhov’s “Darling”, Saunders writes that the story seems to ask us to sit down to judge the character and ask, “Is this trait good or bad?” Chekhov, he tells us, replies: “Yes”.