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How to treat someone with kindness, even when it’s hard
One flawed thinking machine, looking at another
Most people want to be kind. A casual insight from what may be the world’s best fiction writer taught me how to do that, and it works even when the person you’re trying to be kind to seems helplessly, hopelessly out of touch with reality.
George Saunders is one of my favorite authors. Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Mann Booker prize in 2017, is an outright masterpiece, a vividly imagined story of what took place in the graveyard where President Lincoln spent his evenings after the death of his son Willie, seated quietly in a crypt beside the boy’s open casket as the Civil War raged. I picked up his collection of short stories — Tenth of December, a National Book Award finalist in 2014 — after that, and finished his latest — A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — just as my Racket journey was getting underway. Swim encapsulates the class Saunders teaches at Syracuse, where he uses the classic short stories of Russian Masters like Tolstoy and Chekhov to help aspiring writers find their voice and hone their craft. It’s the best book about writing since Elements of Style, an inspiring but eminently practical guide for writers looking to illuminate the truth in a way only fiction can.
