There was the writer, there was what he or she had written, and now there is the tape recorder, creator of the interview, a twentieth-century literary form, an intrusion on intimacy yet a form that requires journalistic, even Flaubertian, distance; a literary form in which the writer looks at life and his work with a new impersonality, with a rhythm that should sound spontaneous in its sentences. This creates a benign beast, a double who speaks for the writer but whose stories, given the fallibility of memory, we do not completely trust. Interviews attract us because we want to devour banalities, the exactly ordinary, in other words, gossip. The old saying that no one cares “what porridge had John Keats” is a pretext. It is very important, bringing Keats up-to-date, to know if he prefers oatmeal to All-Bran, because the knowledge does not diminish but increases our astonishment at the magic of the Odes. It is like that touching confession of García Márquez’s that he wanted to go back home because he had forgotten the smell of guava. We do not want our own biographies written, our sins are intolerable, yet we read the lives of other writers not as critics but as fans. That is what the greatest novels are, anyway—gossip. Joyce’s voice, like a long shaggy-dog story, burbles Ulysses along; Flaubert, for all his nail-paring, cannot cut himself off from his fiction. From the Odyssey through The Divine Comedy to a Hemingway short story or a fable by García Márquez, what keeps fiction alive is the shared intimacy of the author whispering in our ear, as if we were the machine…