This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker. I'm Deborah

Treisman fiction at the New Yorker. On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Joseph O'Neill read his story The Time Being from the March 18th 2024 issue of the magazine.

O'Neill is the author of one story collection in four novels, including Netherland, which won the Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, and The Dog.

A new novel, Godwin, will be published in June.

Now here's Joseph O'Neill.

The time being, in my early 30s, I began to cultivate the friendship of older people,

people born 20 or 30 or even 50 years before me.

I read many novels in those days.

My new friends contained the experiences of life

in the way that novels did, with chapters involving marriages, careers, wars, intergenerational dramas, travels, denouments, death. Their biographical force field was strong. They embodied the theme of

time. Time was thematic. It was not yet a source of ever worsening personal harm.

One of these older people was V.

He was a white European, but my the impression of him

not unlike the impression I would then gain of certain senior black Americans,

namely that they were subjects of history.

This was the year 2000.

In the faces of older New Yorkers or so I believed,

you could spot the vestiges of Jim Crow.

For that matter of the Third Reich and the Iron Curtain and the Great Leap Forward.

What Voi-Tec and the great leap forward.

What Voi-Eck Botelomeus, whom everyone called V, or Mr. V, had been through, I didn't know.

But his bearing was that of the survivor.

...