The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Paul Theroux Reads V. S. Pritchett

March 1, 2025·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Paul Theroux knew V.S. Pritchett and explains why so many writers, including himself, have written necklace stories.

Paul Theroux returns to the archive. Deborah Treisman introduces him as a fiction writer with almost forty books, including "Burma Sahib" and "The Vanishing Point." The story is Pritchett's "The Necklace," published in the magazine in February of 1958, and Treisman places it beside Theroux's earlier choices from Borges and Elizabeth Taylor. The reading takes over. Before it starts, Theroux says he loves the story and begins to talk about his connection to Pritchett. Then the mood tightens. A narrator remembers his sister's word for Nell's gray eyes, which makes her seem empty and too exposed at once. Marriage, here, feels less cozy than watchful. The necklace has fallen on the green quilt, and Jim understands that Nell has been going through his pockets for years. His explanation is plain enough: he found it in the gutter on Alston Street and thinks it belongs at the police station. Nell hears a cover story. She compares what he says with what she thinks he told Plushie and keeps pushing. The necklace becomes proof, to her, that Jim bought a gift for some girl. The fight turns physical. Nell tears it off, throws it onto the bed, and collapses in a way Jim finds ugly and awful. His memory pulls in his mother and sister too, making Nell's distress feel like part of an older family pattern. Treisman closes by returning to Theroux's New Yorker history, his collections, and related fiction podcasts.

As heard by us

Theroux reads Pritchett's "The Necklace" as a found trinket turns into a sour test of marital trust.

Paul Theroux chooses V. S. Pritchett's "The Necklace" with the ease of a writer who knew him, and that connection gives this New Yorker Fiction episode a quiet charge.

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