George Saunders leads a cheerful course on the possibilities of fiction

I give the book a terribly technical sound. It is not. Saunders lives in synapses – he watches all the minute, meaningful decisions that produce a compelling sentence, paragraph, character. It offers one of the most accurate and beautiful representations of what it is like to be on the mind of the writer I have ever read – that state of heightened vigilance, of quick decisions like l lightning.

The book might provoke comparisons to Nabokov’s classic lectures on Russian literature, first given at Cornell. But where Nabokov is all in high-feathered prose and set back, presiding over his lectern, Saunders is at your elbow, praising praise – “my good knight,” he addresses us.

I don’t think I’ve ever been called a soldier before. I’m not sure I like it.

This is where I have to admit that I can find myself in an occasional sort of bardo on Saunders, torn between awe and mistrust. The breadth of his belief in fiction is inspiring – and flattering to the reader. “There is a vast underground network of good at work in the world,” he writes. “A network of people who have made reading the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more extensive and generous.”

Now, I’m as self-interested a champion of fiction as anyone, but such an exaggeration doesn’t do the form any favors – at best it seems naive, at worst, deeply solipsistic. 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 Saunders is too far advanced spiritually to read his reviews. If he did, however, I imagine he could be beaming. “Good little soldier,” he might say.

There is no accusation I have made here that Saunders did not make himself. “I’m kind of an impulsive Pollyanna-ish,” he said. “I like to find hope, sometimes irritating: ‘Oh, there’s a nail in my head. It’s great, I’m going to hang a coat there, it’s going to be good. ”

And it is precisely this sort of ambiguity in thought that he reifies, and that fiction, he tells us, makes possible.

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