I’m a longtime fan of the fiction podcast presented monthly by The New Yorker. In each podcast, Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, asks writers who have recently published fiction in the magazine to select a short story from the magazine’s archives and to read it aloud and consider their reasons for admiring it. Not every podcast is a gem, of course, but more often than not the stories are great, the readings are exceptional, and the discussions are quietly appreciative in a way that I think is all too rare in contemporary literary discourse. Among my favourites: Louise Erdrich reading Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides reading Harold Brodkey, Tobias Wolff reading Stephanie Vaughn, T.C. Boyle reading Tobias Wolff, Aleksandar Hemon reading Bernard Malamud, and Richard Ford reading John Cheever.
This month, though, the podcast has completely outdone itself with Cynthia Ozick offering a beautiful reading and impassioned discussion of Steven Millhauser’s ‘In the Reign of Harad IV.’ The story must be one of the best ever to appear in The New Yorker, and Ozick’s vocalisation of it perfectly conveys the otherworldliness of its metafictional monomania. But what really sets this podcast apart from the others is the discussion between Ozick and Deborah Triesman before and after the reading. Triesman usually remains aloof or politely inquisitive, offering very little of her own thoughts on a given story while prompting the writer in the studio to disclose theirs in detail. This time, however, she lays out her own views on the story alongside Ozick’s views, revealing, to my surprise, a palpable appreciation of the story that matches Ozick’s appreciation of it even as she challenges Ozick on points of literary interpretation. Their discussion won’t revolutionise current thinking on Millhauser’s work, of course, but it’s still great to be able to hear such careful and intelligent readers give serious consideration to a fiction that — despite the faux whimsy of its premise — wants and deserves to be taken seriously.
Infinite Patience 