What comes to define the book is the ambivalence with which Saunders approaches his role as mentor. As he goes along, he proposes several competing definitions of a “story”, ranging from the formal (“a limited set of elements we read against one another”) to the loosely metaphorical (“a system for the transfer of energy … a series of incremental pulses”).

These stabs at delineation are accompanied by advice of a general nature, much of which is standard writing-guide fare: express yourself efficiently, make sure every detail contributes to the overall effect, the better part of writing is revising, try not to bore your reader, and so on.

At the same time, however, Saunders is anxious to avoid prescriptivism. He stresses the provisional nature of all writing advice. He argues that writers should learn to trust their instincts, cultivate their own distinctive tastes, grant themselves the freedom to write without any predetermined purpose. In his conclusion, he makes a point of observing that the realism of Chekhov and Tolstoy was a stylistic innovation of the 19th century and should not be taken as a model for writing about life in the 21st century. He even goes so far as to deny that A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a writing guide at all.

In a sense, he is right. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain uses its discussion of formal issues to open up a wider series of reflections on the purpose of fiction. And on this question Saunders, for all his reticence, does have a clearly stated position.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain makes explicit a moral view that is implicit in his stories, which is that he believes people are essentially good. Yes, a few may be incorrigibly wicked, but for the most part cruelty and suffering are caused by misunderstandings and small individual failures of empathy.

As a view of human nature, this is debatable (Dostoevsky would certainly not agree). But it also entails its own element of prescriptivism. One of the book’s revealing anecdotes concerns a student who objected to a sexist remark in one of Gogol’s stories.

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Saunders reports that he defused this tense situation by inviting the class to see this as a “technical flaw” rather than a moral one, at which point there was relieved assent that the story would have been “better” had the character not been traduced so unfairly.

Crisis averted. But I beg to differ. As Saunders acknowledges, Gogol was a serious weirdo. One might add that only a serious weirdo could have written a story as brilliantly bonkers as The Nose. The talent cannot be separated from the flaws. A morally unimpeachable Gogol would be pointless. Saunders goes on to quote Nabokov’s observation that “genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life”.