Suburban Stall

Lonely, alienated men and women in mangled marriages, sad and wary children who watch from doorways and the top of the stairs—we meet them in New York City apartments, and then, after Cheever moved his family to the suburbs, in the leafy lanes and Dutch colonials of Westchester. His characters are nearly all cut from the same pattern. There is not all that much to distinguish, say, Johnny Hake in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" from Neddy Merrill in "The Swimmer." But as his stories get under our skins like a dream from which we wake in a cold sweat, as they, in a word, succeed, we begin to see that it makes no sense to judge Cheever by the ordinary yardsticks of fiction. And as with dreams, it is all but impossible to say what makes them work—it is not even clear that Cheever himself knew. When a story was succeeding for him, he barely blotted a line. When it wasn't, he often threw it away.

Cheever is and is not a great writer. There are easily a dozen stories in the Library of America collection that rank with the best short fiction of the last century. But for every "Five-Forty-Eight" or "Death of Justina," there are five more that seem thin or obvious—and probably seem thinner and more obvious than they should, because Cheever's stock was once so over-valued (one reviewer hailed the publication of the collected stories as a "grand occasion in English literature"). Still, a dozen great stories is a sterling record by any reckoning, and when he was good, he was very, very good, capable of breaking your heart, cracking you up and scaring you silly, all in the same paragraph. The novels are every bit as uneven as the stories. But the two Wapshot novels, though messy and episodic, remain delightful, particularly the sections that dwell on the southern Massachusetts shoreline towns where he grew up. They are funny, relaxed, melancholy but ultimately wonderful. Writing about the Wapshots, most of whom were based on members of his own family, he seems, for once, to be enjoying himself, and the pleasure is contagious.

If there is a recognizable template for Cheever's fiction, it is the fairy tale. We do not know much more about Jim and Irene Westcott, the couple in "The Enormous Radio," than we know about Hansel and Gretel, but we want desperately to find out how they'll contend with their new console radio that pipes their neighbors' conversations into their apartment. The Westcotts are like people bewitched, and here, as in so many of these stories, circumstance, not character, is the driving force. In "The Music Teacher," Cheever goes so far as to baldly identify the title character as a witch. And "The Swimmer's" protagonist, a man whose life slips away while he isn't looking, could easily claim kin with Rip Van Winkle, another character with a bad marriage whose creator hailed, not so coincidentally, from Tarrytown, two stops down the train line from Ossining.

When a thunderstorm rumbles down the Hudson River valley, I have no trouble hearing those crashing ninepins that Rip heard centuries ago. And at the end of even the lousiest day, when I gaze into the twilight settling like a beneficent mantle on the Palisades across the river, I, too, am tempted to agree with Cheever that here is a place "where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." The light in the yellow leaves of autumn, the smell of mud flats at low tide—in such things he found a redemptive quality. "The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter," he wrote in "Bullet Park," but he could have written that sentence in every story and novel. To the extent that Cheever country is not some mythic or metaphorical realm but a real world of rocks, trees, streams and lawns bathed in a lambent light, I am happy to call it home and happily in the debt of the man who put it all into words that are, as far as I can see, as durable as the things they describe.

© 2009