The Stories of John Cheever (ISBN 0394500873)

Amazon.com Review:
Think of John Cheever's fiction, and a whole world springs to mind--a world of leafy suburbs, summer houses, commuter trains, boarding schools, and inevitably, his own chosen territory, the cocktail hour among WASPs. But it's a mistake to approach Cheever as if he were merely some sort of anthropologist documenting the customs of an obscure and vanishing tribe. Nostalgia and class issues aside, his true subject is the darkness hidden beneath the surface of postwar American life. A case in point is his famous story "The Swimmer," in which an ebullient Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the backyard pools of his neighbors. In the course of his journey, however, summer gives way to autumn, his neighbors turn against him, there are troubling intimations of disgrace and financial ruin, and he arrives to find his house both locked and empty. Though these stories deal with bright, prosperous, ostensibly happy people, a cold wind blows through them. Age, illness, financial embarrassment, sex, alcohol, death--all of these threaten his suburban Eden. (Is it himself Cheever is mocking in his ironic "The Worm in the Apple"? "Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?") Inanimate objects carry the residue of their past owners' unhappiness and cruelty ("Seaside Houses," "The Lowboy"); expatriates long for but cannot quite find their way home ("The Woman Without A Country," "Boy in Rome"); children vanish or turn out badly (too many stories to count). All of this is conveyed in prose both graceful and tender. No one is better than Cheever at describing a character's appearance: "He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream." Given his uncanny eye (and ear) for realistic description, it's easy to forget how experimental Cheever could be. His later stories pioneered authorial intrusions in the best postmodern style, and from the beginning, he wrote what would much later be called magical realism. (Think of the sinister broadcasts in "The Enormous Radio," or the phantom love interest in "The Chimera.") A literary event at its publication and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever remains a stunning and enormously influential book. --Mary Park

Solid:
Of all the archetypal New Yorker short story writers of the Twentieth Century- John O'Hara, John Updike, Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger- perhaps the best of them was John Cheever- and he was certainly the best of the three big Johns. That said, I do not particularly like John Cheever's stories. Of the over sixty tales in this collection a good thee quarters involved characters that do not personally interest me- mid-Twentieth Century upper crust whites, martini-totaling who seem as stranded on the island of Manhattan, or his fictive suburb of Shady Hill, physically as their views of the world are intellectually. In his world even middle class people have maids. But, almost all of the tales are tight and well-wrought, and that's an important distinction to note when reviewing, for few critics are able to separate themselves from their biases and inclinations. That said, while the tales are good, and at their best, very good, excellent, and even near-great, there isn't a one that really leapt out as being inarguably great, mostly because they are tales that work on only one or two levels, even when ricjly layered. This is because they follow a formula, the New Yorker formula, and follow it well, but Cheever never achieves an expansion of his character's worlds the way he tinkers incessantly with the interior narrative structures. To use a metaphor, his stories are solidly and well built, but the interior decorating can be atrocious. His tales almost always start off with a good and/or arresting start, and his ends are also usually quite deft. The middle sometimes sag, in even the best tales, not because of length, but because the tales are so dependent upon their extreme supports.... Technically, Cheever also pulls off marvelous turns of narrative direction that can leave one with a wholly unexpected ending, as judged by a tale's start, but wholly realistic if reading the tale. There is also a dealing with the same themes and life events that occurs in many of the tales. In Just Tell Me Who It Was a rich, successful older man finds out his younger wife has cuckolded him, and attacks the man he suspects did it, in public, but unlike the scene in Goodbye, My Brother, the violence flows naturally from the story elements that lead up to it. Another element from Goodbye, My Brother that is reworked more successfully in another tale occurs in The Seaside Houses, in which the end of a marriage and the passage of time are all summed up in a fleeting instant by the narrator. It is a tale void of the melodrama of the lesser tale that shares its themes. That the two better tales were published in the New Yorker in 1978 and the lesser one in 1951 should not surprise. The depth and richness of the later tales is evident. Yet, a brief tale like Reunion, in which a father and son briefly reunite, never to see each other again, is also terrifically wrought and almost lyrical. Yet, as good as he can be, his tales should be read sparingly, because too many in a row tends to manifest the New Yorkerish weaknesses in his short story corpus: suburbia, adultery, middle class purgatory, fedoras, regretful housewives, and cocktail parties that all become fairy taleish, and are topped off with a climactic three or four sentence epiphany. John O'Hara may have invented that genre, but Cheever brought it to its apex, and- as shown- the epiphanies can be marvelous. In a sense, one might argue he personified the post-World War Two generation in fiction the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age. Fortunately, though, Cheever is the far superior short story stylist because his tales are not as hermetically walled off to the contemporary reader as those of Fitzgerald, and therefore more emotionally more accessible, especially when limning schlubs. Yet, many of Cheever's tales, as formulaic as they could be, also broke the fourth wall, or commented slyly on themselves, pointing up the lie that Postmodernism was anything new or revolutionary. And, in Cheever's story, the devices actually enhance or serve the tales, and are not mere accoutrements to blow the writer's own horn, and solipsistically preen on their coolness. The art comes first in Cheever's tales. Look at how he describes a simple act in The Enormous Radio, a tale about an old woman who loses herself in another world: ....The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio. The Stories Of John Cheever may not be the best Twentieth Century American fiction had to offer, but it's emblemic. To not read or not understand these tales is to be as void of the American character as ignoring Dickens is to the English character or Chekhov is to the Russian character of the prior century. Read the book, learn from it, and seek out those who will do even more for this century.

Cheever, A grand story teller!:
John Cheever tells his short, thought bending stories with the eye of a pained man. In the swimmer he outlines the deapths of alcoholism with an eye to detail and a symbolism that provkes great loss.

Quantity over quality:
That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. There are the classics, like "The Swimmer", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", and my personal favorite, "Reunion", which more than live up to the hype. Then there are the rest, which are a notch below. Some are boring, some are unsatisfying, and some just flat out go on too long and don't know when to end. Still, when taken as a whole, these stories provide a fascinating glimpse into the lives of those living in the East coast after the second World War, urban and suburban, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful. As Cheever notes in his fascinating introduction, reading these stories is sometimes like taking a glimpse into a lost and vanished world. Still, it's a world which he captures in exacting and thorough detail, in his own unique voice, and that reason alone makes this a compelling and rewarding collection, that, in its totality, is a classic.

Lots and Lots of Cheever:
Like any large collection of short fiction (and here Cheever's stories weight in at 693 pages in my edition) there is a great deal of material here that is of marginal quality. But for the reader who can hang on through Cheever's innumerable attempts to hammer out the same themes with relentless consistency (the rented summer home, the failed vacation, the desperate office manager, the expatriate in Italy living a dream of surreal desperation) this work is well worth reading for the surprises one encounters along the way. Cheever surmounts himself at some points; some stories reach a sublime level which is only hinted at in the less successful attempts. For writers, the large-collection-of-short-stories- taken-from-a-life-time-of-writing can be instructional texts. How do we retell our Ur story in new and refreshing ways? How do we surmount our own story, to get at something both more primal and more novel?

J. Cheever:
I bought this book for a research paper. It turned out to be a great book and is full of interesting short stories.