Mary Gaitskill Reads John Cheever

玛丽·盖茨基尔(Mary Gaitskill)阅读John Cheever

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2017-03-01

1 小时 1 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Mary Gaitskill reads and discusses “The Five-Forty-Eight,” by John Cheever.

单集文稿 ...

  • 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 the 548 by John Cheever, which was published in the New Yorker in April of 1954.

  • He wondered what she had hoped to gain by a glimpse of him coming out of the office building at the end of the day.

  • Then he wondered if she was following him.

  • The story was chosen by Mary Gaitskill, who's the author of three story collections and three novels, including the Mayor, which was published in 2015.

  • Hi, Mary.

  • Hi.

  • Last time you were on the podcast, you read an Nabokov story, and this time you knew pretty much right away that you wanted to read achiever story.

  • Why was that?

  • I think that I had been focused on his stories right around that time.

  • I've been a lover of his stories for a while, but I think I was particularly appreciative of this one right at that moment.

  • I had assigned it to a class, and one of the people in class, I owe her for this, I suppose, because it really did make me think about Cheever in a different way than I had.

  • She kind of grudgingly admired the story, but said he was a narcissist, that she had read somewhere, that a therapist somewhere had declared that this was true.

  • And I don't know why she even thought this was relevant, but it kind of made me think about him in a more intensive way, and I began to think about how people judge writers like that and how.

  • What a different world he lived in.

  • He did seek help.

  • He did.

  • He was, as it's known from his journals that he was.