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.
Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
Reese Okyong Kwon
Reese Okyong Kwon's writing is published or forthcoming in the Believer, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony, and was named one of Narrative's "30 Below 30" writers. She can be found at www.reesekwon.com.