Roger Angell reads John Updike's short story "Playing with Dynamite," and talks with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about editing Updike.
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.
John Updike died on January 27.
Between 1954 and 2008, he contributed literally hundreds of pieces of fiction and poetry, book reviews and essays to the magazine.
This month, Roger Angell, Updike's longtime editor at the New Yorker, will read a story from 1992 called playing with dynamite.
All around him as he and his wife stood hip deep in children.
Marriages blew up, marriage counselors, child psychiatrists, lawyers, real estate agents prospered in the ruins.
Roger, you were Updike's fiction editor at the magazine for more than 30 years.
How did you start working with him?
I was in the fiction department back then, and William Maxwell, the writer and also New Yorker editor, had been John's editor.
And when he left the magazine to become a full time novelist, I succeeded Maxwell.
And it was strange because John is younger by a dozen years than I am, but it was like getting an older writer because he started writing.
He'd started writing at such an early age and with such great accomplishment.
Can you talk a bit about what it was like to work on his stories?
It was a pleasure because he was.
Patient with editing, and if I suggested.
That the paragraph needed a little something.
More, there was something that didn't seem as clear as it should have been in a certain passage.
He was always patient and listened.