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JOHN CHEEVER

COLLECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS

But there’s more to Cheever—in the Proustian digressiveness of “The Jewels of the Cabots”; the episodic (pre-Wapshot) comedy...

Despite the early acceptance of John Cheever (1912–82) as a writer of short stories for prestigious magazines (the New Republic, the New Yorker), he struggled for decades to support a growing family and earn critical respect (both of these goals were realized, in spades, in his later years). Conversely, the roles Cheever played adeptly—those of a conventional, albeit eccentric suburbanite and a doting paterfamilias—were forcibly shed as he slipped further into lifelong alcoholism and a troubled, if finally liberating confrontation with his deeply conflicted sexuality.

What has always been most attractive about Cheever’s springy, eternally hopeful, extroverted fiction is its beguiling sense of open-ended possibility: the “territory ahead” or “world elsewhere” that beckon implicitly in American narratives, from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Twain’s Mississippi River adventuring, to Saul Bellow’s chronicles of newly made Americans seizing their futures from the flotsam and jetsam of a truly patchwork country and culture. As Cheever moved into the ampler realms of the novel, his short stories’ trademark focus on moments of epiphany or recognition—in which the urban and quotidian become perturbed and energized by their collision with the fabulous and mythical—expanded into generously imagined narratives—of families transformed by the compromises of aging and changing (in the delightful paired novels The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal) and of an even more radical transformation in Falconer, a masterly fable of crime and punishment, imprisonment and ascension. Despite these climactic achievements, it is Cheever as storyteller that most readers prize above his other incarnations. The Library of America’s irresistible collection includes the complete contents of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1978 Stories, plus handfuls of uncollected stories and others published in Cheever’s essentially disowned 1941 debut collection The Way Some People Live. All 75 of these are incontestably worth reading, and many have taken up permanent residence in their readers’ memories. Classic portrayals of suburban angst range from essentially conventional cautionary tales (“The Sorrows of Gin,” “The Five-Forty-Eight”), redeemed by their imaginative intensity, to stronger, darker visions—e.g., of a radio in an apartment building that broadcasts details of its occupants’ lives (“The Enormous Radio”); a financially strapped Everyman who finds himself robbing his affluent neighbors’ homes (“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”); and the perilously heightened imagination that afflicts the chance survivor of an airplane crash (“The Country Husband”).

But there’s more to Cheever—in the Proustian digressiveness of “The Jewels of the Cabots”; the episodic (pre-Wapshot) comedy of “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well”; and, in the best story he ever wrote, a heartbreakingly candid revelation (“Goodbye, My Brother”) of a loving relationship finally understood as both blessing and curse. The mysteriousness of human love and frailty and confusion has seldom been confessed and celebrated with such passionate candor. Attention must be paid, and glasses should be raised in tribute and gratitude to it.

Pub Date: March 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-59853-034-6

Page Count: 1056

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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