Oh What A Paradise It Seems
Wimsatt, Margaret
Faith & the greased pole 0H WHAT A PARADISE IT SEENS John Cheever Alfred A. Knopf, $10, 100 pp. Margaret Wimsatt THIS latest brief novel by John Cheever might make a good introduction to the...
...Others remain unexplained...
...Sammy is given the job of collecting the fees at the family project, filling Beasley's Pond...
...Finally, like its predecessor Falconer, the tale stops, with no true ending...
...Cheever's men put up with uncommon humiliations to attain this...
...He may live in a monastery or on a mountain top...
...A man on the wrong side of middle age longs, we know, not only for the physical gratification but for the reassurance the company of an attractive woman can bring him, in bed and in public places...
...Lemuel funds a reclamation project, and at the end of the story is happily explaining entrophiba-tion and its reversal to interested visitors...
...What a Paradise it seemed...
...This whimsy has little to do with the book...
...Why, for instance, are there in Paradise two scenes of a man with a rifle kneeling in a pondside mint bed, with another man targeted in teh crosshairs of his sight...
...One man, reflecting, can encompass the universe...
...probably) have obtained a zoning variation to fill the pond with rubbish, thereby polluting nearby wetlands and poisoning the neighborhood water supply...
...The Cheever tone can cloy, and his elegant vocabulary tire...
...This wealthy worthy Lemuel has the carnal itch of all Cheever heroes...
...Cheever does not need vast numbers of characters or statistics...
...The framework of the plot concerns Lemuel Sears, his unspoiled milltown home named Janice after the first miller's first wife, Beasley's Pond nearby (a body of water so charming it might have inspired a nineteenth-century landscape painter) and his relationship to his adversaries...
...Margaret Wimsatt THIS latest brief novel by John Cheever might make a good introduction to the long and unified body of his work...
...The essential Cheever themes are here: religion, sensuality, the Wordsworthian longing for innocence, the people, materially well-off but so often poor within, and the settings, with home base an easy commute from the city, but outfields as wide as the world...
...Also on the wrong side are most of the town's officials, venal politicians with old Wasp names...
...These evil forces (the Mafia...
...His main gift underlies and overlies all these...
...Lemuel's allies are a lawyer (murdered), an environmentalist (murdered), and a daffy young married woman from Hitching Post Lane named Betsy...
...Lined up against Lemuel is an Italian "family," some of whose members invite governors to their weddings and dine at the White House, but whose local representative is an unsuccessful barber for whom the family assumes responsibility...
...Incidents and scenes one has met before recur...
...This little book has its flaws...
...An interspersed sub-plot relates his pursuit of and temporary liaison with Renee, a woman he picks up in a bank teller's queue...
...His wit with the self-mocking smile he or his people sometimes display, the wide range of his references (mythology, history, geography, and certain processes of the contemporary world, in this case, computer containers) play their parts...
...As I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night...
...The role of religion in his characters' lives, faith held on to as the climber grasps the greased pole, challenges us all...
...The cleansing of the pond thereupon takes first place in the book, and sex is heard of no more...
...After Renee's departure, Lemuel has a brief homosexual fling with the doorman at her apartment house...
...Cheever is a master of incident...
...He may even live in Westchester County...
...But plot is not what attracts his readers...
...There are several paradises implied in the title - the heavenly, in its old religious sense, the carnal, still with its mixture of bliss and despair, and the literally earthly...
...there is always enough happening in his stories and novels to keep our curiosity alive...
...An old story this, the battle of the small owner against the giant developer, of the exurbanite trying to save exurbia, and of all of us who try to protect this fragile planet...
...It is love, compassion, admiration for God's world in all its complexity, and gratitude for the gift of life...
...Betsy at last saves the day by threatening to poison, with doctored bottles of teriyaki sauce, all the customers of the local supermarket...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
