BOOKS

Suburban Stall

'Mad Men' is hot. So is Richard Yates. Where are the Cheever believers?

By Malcolm Jones | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 9, 2009

« Return to Article

Discuss

Member Comments

  • Posted By: chrisepting @ 03/08/2009 3:06:48 AM

    I had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Cheever for a number of years--this is a recent piece i wrote about him:

    http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/cheever_ossining.aspx

  • Posted By: chrisepting @ 03/08/2009 3:05:33 AM

    I had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Cheever for a number of years--this is a recent article I wrote about the experience:

    http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/cheever_ossining.aspx

  • Posted By: JLThomas @ 03/07/2009 7:52:21 AM

    A well-written article about a fine American writer.
    Though Cheever's version of the man in the gray flannel suit is long gone from Americana, that same brand of disillusionment still haunts us today. And the talent to observe that particular dichotomy in all of us makes his work timeless and continually relevant.

  • Posted By: nanachalfont @ 03/05/2009 12:14:23 PM

    Seems like Mr Jones projected his own ambivalence onto his essay which I'd have enjoyed more were the questions posed answered. Why indeed are there so few Cheever believers if 'believers' is even appropriate for an author of fabulist lit. Cheever told a great story- if only a few of us remember him with the regard he experienced before he died. I believe his daughter wrote that he finally had groupies- in me he still does.

  • Posted By: RodneyWelch @ 03/04/2009 2:41:32 PM

    I was born in 1958 and never got around to reading all of Cheever in depth until the late 1980s. He and his world were dead and gone by then, but I never noticed, because his prose is so graceful and the world of his fiction is as alive and real and true -- true to his sense of it -- as that of almost any great writer I can name. Not only that, he made it look incredibly easy, mainly because he was genuinely gifted. Read his letters and journals. He could wander out of bed hungover and sit down to casually type up sentences most of us would kill for.

    Jones writes "The satirist's subject has vanished, the anxieties that gave his stories a lot of their pop are your father's anxieties, not yours." I lived in the Deep South, and my father was a Southern Baptist minister whose anxieties could never be described as Cheeveresque. Doesn't matter. You don't have to have been there to appreciate him anymore than you had to have lived in Dickens' time or Austen's time to appreciate them. Cheever's achievement doesn't rest merely on the fact that he captured people in a certain era, but that the world he knew comes alive when you read it, and that those often sad people are alive and interesting, and that they reflect truths of human character that do not change. The fear that you'll never live up to your dreams, that life is somehow all slipping away, and that the life you're living has never quite gained the luster you imagined for it -- these are themes you see in stories ranging from "Torch Song" to "The Swimmer" to "The Country Husband" and that will always dominate the life of men and women everywhere. Some anxieties, if that's what you want to call them, never die.

    Then there is this from Jones: "Repeatedly, I was struck by how often Cheever projected his own sadness and anxiety onto characters who usually lack his own sense of self-reflection and intelligence." That's nothing but cheapjack biographical criticism. Is fiction supposed to be judged on its own merits, or measured against the life of the author?

    Also, to address one commenter, the fact that Cheever didn't write about the issues of his day is utterly meaningless. Writers have no duty whatsoever to capture the times they are living in. Their only duty is to capture the world that exists in their imagination. Cheever didn't write topical fiction about McCarthy and hippies and Vietnam -- if that's your cup of meat, head for the local secondhand bookstore, where you'll find the bulk of it falling to pieces, unremembered and unmourned.

  • Posted By: kennethlwoodward @ 03/04/2009 12:34:29 PM

    Malcolm, excellent essay. Ossining was never a place Cheever wrote about, except perhaps in Falconer, which is set in Sing Sing prison. Nor was it ever Cheever country as you point out. You might have mentioned Newsweek's role in boosting his reputation late in life: Newsweek put him on its cover when the Collected Short Stories were published in 1978. It helped that his daughter worked at Newsweek then and so was there to escort him around the place. Cheever never wrote about the Sixties which is why readers for whom nothing much happened before the Sixties will never understand his work, or Updike's, especially if they read fiction only to find their own experiences in it.

  • Posted By: kenyatta @ 03/02/2009 4:12:52 PM

    I too believe that Cheever is overrated. Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Styron and Baldwin were the real giants of that generation. Cheever on the other hand, was basically a lightweight. To read his short stories and novels, you would never have known that McCarthyism had taken place, or that a Civil Rights Movement was going on, or that Vietnam and the Counterculture were redrawing the country's cultural landscape.

    Instead what we get with Cheever is an endless succession of bland, uniformly white, static suburban characters who never engage with the great events of their day, not even from the periphery. He's worse even than the recently departed Updike in this regard, whose work at least reflected in his portrayals of his character's sex lives the impact that the sexual revolution had on the people of his own time. Why is Cheever even worthy of this kind of study? The world that he wrote about, if it ever even existed, vanished at least four decades ago. Let it rest for God's sake.

Reply

Report Abuse

Enter comments if any for reporting abuse