Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike

This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the thirty-minute interview is posted in its entirety. They talk of religion, The New Yorker, sex, the Apostles’ Creed, the suburbs, and, of course, each other’s work. Watch for Updike’s smile when the senior Cheever says that Rabbit is Rich is the most exciting novel he’s read “in a great many years,” and listen for Cheever’s magnificent voice.