2018-09-04
1 小时 8 分钟Tessa Hadley joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "New York Girl," by John Updike, from a 1996 issue of the magazine. Hadley is the author of nine books of fiction, including the story collection "Bad Dreams and Other Stories," which was published last year. She won the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction in 2016 and has been publishing in The New Yorker since 2002.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear New York girl by John Updike, which was published in the New Yorker in April of 1996.
I'm interested more in the flanges, I said, but she knew already that I was interested in her.
I had gone stupid.
Something existed between us like a mist.
The story was chosen by Tessa Hadley, who's the author of nine books of fiction, including the collections Married Love and Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which was published last year.
Hi Tessa.
Hi Deborah.
So you came on the podcast a few years ago to read a story by Nadine Gordimer.
What made you choose John Updike this time around?
Oh, it's funny, I hadn't thought of a connection between that Nadine Gordon story and this, but I've just once popped into my head, I mean, in a way, what contrasted stories in that the Gordomer is so darkly political, and this is, if you like, an indulgent story, a story about surplus of pleasure in one sense.
But I remember Gordama saying something somewhere about how nobody would ask John Updike to write stories about politics or keep him to a political standardization.
They kept her.
So there's so isn't it fascinating, these two things going on in the same world, two great writers, and one of them feeling that iron, steely frame pressing on her to be political and have the right answers and some lovely freedom that Updike, to my mind, writes himself into in his work.
I'm a huge fan.
I love his short stories.
I think I love his short stories just a bit better than I love his novels, actually, some of them I have been fascinated by.
But there's something about the concentration of the short form with him that brings out all the things he's brilliant at.