One summer, while George Saunders was working long days in the searing oil fields of Texas, he had something like an epiphany. Parked in an RV in his parents’ driveway in Amarillo, Saunders spent evenings reading The Grapes of Wrath. In the Okies, he saw a reflection of his work crew, which included a Vietnam vet and recently released convict.
“We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism,” he writes, “the necessary costs of doing business. In short Steinbeck was writing about life as I saw it.” In his own fiction, Saunders rarely writes about life as we see it. His worlds are more like funhouse mirrors of our own. But, like Steinbeck, the celebrated author has placed life’s important questions at the heart of his work.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders’s new book, is a version of his short story class at Syracuse…
