The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III

Philip Gourevitch

Picador

All biog­ra­phy is a form of lit­er­ary voyeurism, and the Paris Review inter­views are no excep­tion. Do we really need to know whether Ted Hughes reordered the poems in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel? Or that Evelyn Waugh believed the sev­en­teenth cen­tury to be “the time of the great­est drama and romance”? Probably not; but some­times this eaves­drop­ping can be fruit­ful: I was so taken with the wit and intel­li­gence dis­played by John Cheever in his 1976 Paris Review inter­view that I knew I would enjoy his writ­ing too. How can you not feel fond of an author who defines a good edi­tor as one who “sends me large checks, praises my work, my phys­i­cal beauty, and my sex­ual prowess, and who has a stran­gle­hold on the pub­lisher and the bank”? The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III (Picador) is the lat­est in this excel­lent series of talks with lead­ing nov­el­ists, drama­tists and poets, selected from the archives of the leg­endary lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. These six­teen inter­views were selected from many oth­ers that appeared between the years 1955 (Ralph Ellison) and 2007 (Norman Mailer, inter­viewed just months before he died). In her intro­duc­tion, Margaret Atwood — whose 1990 inter­view is not included in this or the pre­vi­ous two vol­umes — states what most would agree with: that this series of inter­views is the “gold stan­dard” against which all author inter­views are to be measured.