“Late Radio Talk Show Host Tells All” is a new story by Cynthia Ozick. To mark the story’s publication, Ozick and Oliver Munday, the magazine’s associate creative director, discussed the story via email. Their conversation has been slightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Mundy: Your story, “Late Radio Talk Show Host Tells All,” is about an aging radio host named Nicky. It’s a fascinating and profound character study. What drew you to after-hours radio as a fictional setting?
Cynthia Ozick: To begin with, chronic insomnia, which for a while turned into a night addiction. So much of late-night radio is repetitive junk: weather, traffic, headlines, sports, nostrums about this and that ailment, a hum and miasma of voices, voices, voices with a raw croak of what passes for a song. Who’s listening (millions do from their beds) and why? Yet the real impetus for this story was a question I was asked in conversation not too long ago – what do you most desire from your fiction? The answer came so quickly and so unexpectedly that it startled me to the bone: a feeling, a pure feeling. And I thought I might look it up.
monday: Nicky is described ambiguously and remains somewhat enigmatic to the reader. We’re not sure about the details, including the gender. Why silence and obfuscate like this?
Language: But the night radio itself goes dark. When the story’s listeners—mainly old men and a smaller contingent of old women, all of them hoarse, sick, tired, exhausted, resentful, self-righteous—are roused to speak, we hear hundreds of accents and origins that puzzle as the overlay of the native jaffa of New York mixes them all up. Even more notably, some of the more popular talk show hosts in real life often sound indistinguishable between (tall male? short female?). Little wonder, then, that when the handsome boy arrives, he’s surprised to see that Nikki is actually Nicole.
monday: At one point in the story, Nikki muses about potential listeners: “If you call me, you’re hallucinating.” What is the most notable difference between the act of listening and the act of reading?
Language: Um. This may be the first time this question has come up. So let’s see… When we physically grip a book or something statically printed, we are free to look again, think again, wander and ponder, ponder and entertain ourselves, but responding out loud (be it on the radio or to a teacher in a classroom or while speaking at the lectern) means a fleeting one-time opportunity and we are left with what we have said. Therefore, reading is relatively risk-free. Listening is a complete risk. Reading may take time. Listening is flying without wings. Listening to a recorded voice also provides no safety net: the constant machine’s awareness always intervenes. The book may also be a kind of machine, but our unconscious breathing is its motive and engine: us Live in a book.
monday: Radio and podcasts dominate the media. Nicky interestingly describes the floating voice on the radio as a god who can rebuke and seduce. Does the disembodied yet commanding nature of audio appeal to an idol-seeking world?
Language: Immersion in the nightly radio can certainly point to such an observation. Although there are occasional rebels and cranky malcontents who are soon fired, loyalty to the talk show host prevails – reliance on his personal wisdom (mostly his, less often hers), devotion to whatever of domestic life that decided to reveal, whether for comic relief or suspense (what will the new baby be called?). Talk show hosts become authority figures, if not as priests, then as therapists. They are believed to offer continuity, connection, comfort, solace, intimacy. Intimacy above all. You are alone with the comforter, in the dark, in the silence of the night. Even if you don’t participate, even if you’re too hesitant to call the number that repeats itself endlessly, the aura is that of prayer. From a petition. In relief. In submission.
monday: One night Nicky is visited by an intruder at the radio station who accuses Nicky of being a fraud and fake. This incident causes Nikki to question the concepts of performance and pretense; to the idea of ”pure feeling.” This motif is repeated throughout the story. How does one reach a state of pure feeling?
Language: Impersonation and counterfeiting are double-edged razors. They are the devices and designs of the deceiver and counterfeiter, the misleading talk show host himself. But at the same time, they are most desired by the night listener, who will be shocked and disillusioned if he encounters the pragmatic indifference, insincerity of the radio artist. “We must not let daylight upon magic,” said Walter Bagehot of royalty (an old quote brought up by a new coronation), and the state of pure feeling may be one with that magic: It prompts—it commands—the silencing veil of night .
monday: I thought of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as you read this story. Nicky becomes, like Mann’s aging character Aschenbach, obsessed with the beauty and purity of a young boy. You describe “the pathos of a boy’s lonely big toe.” Are beauty and cleanliness closely related?
Language: Mann’s Tadzio is an erotic incarnation and also an emblem of Aschenbach’s longing for his own irretrievable youth. But Niki, the seventy-year-old Nicole, sees in the handsome boy and his imagination an unblemished but wayward innocent who represents beauty, pure beauty, down to its smallest incarnation of flesh and bone. Call it her aesthetic principle; he may really be no more than an apparition. As such, he is also a test: his presence is what he asks, and so are you, Are beauty and cleanliness closely related? The answer I found – or rather the answer this story revealed – is no; something more pressing, more necessary is at stake. Night radio is an outlet for regret, pure regret, and what is regret if not a distilled emotion?
But is there a catch here? Can pity be pure if the talk show host, like Nikki herself, is just an actor? I leave the conclusion to the reader, but here is my personal opinion: Feeling, pure feeling, is a voluntary cooperation between the deity and the believer who is enraptured.
monday: You’ve written many novels and short story collections… How does the process of writing short fiction compare to that of writing novels?
Language: Writing for me is hard work, regardless of length or form. I begin with fear and doubt and continue in this state of lingering dissatisfaction and conscious abuse until I am overcome by certain unpredictable moments of excitement when the thing begins to know itself and its own trajectory. In the long run of a novel, this can get as far as three-quarters of the way through. The short story sometimes knows what it intends to happen from the start, but is completely confused as to how to get there. When the dam suddenly breaks, even the words are found. In general, it is better to have written than to have to write. But not writing, as any writer will testify, is even more punishing than writing!
monday: Apart from short stories, what are you currently working on?
Language: How not to lie when writing fiction.