The Cheerless World of John Cheever

...Like himself, most of his fictional characters have traveled in closed circuits that go from the bar of Grand Central Station to the suburbs of New York and New England...

...Beauty!' The words seem to have the colors of the earth, and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night...

...His lens to the world seems to be set at a more secure point, midway between triumph and disappointment...

...The hero of "A Vision of the World," whose wife is perpetually sad, does a considerable amount of dreaming, and sits up in bed exclaiming: " 'Valor...

...The affable husband of "The Chimera" brings his mate breakfast in bed, only to find her haggard-eyed, avowing "I cannot any longer endure being served...

...Perhaps it is to make amends to himself and us for the disproportion in his focus that so many of Cheever's stories launch into lyrical transports when the human outlook is particularly grim...

...it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains...

...Compassion...

...Love...

...The Bella Lingua" and "The Duchess"—the swimming pools and adulteries of Shady Hill are far behind him and Cheever turns into the most likeable of writers...

...Wisdom...

...Chekhov's plain and pliant responses make us feel that marital disharmony is only one aspect of life, part of the natural order of things, rather than an occasion for outrage...

...An Italian prince despairs because his American wife insists her voice is good enough for the La Scala Opera...

...Similarly, because Cheever moves head-on into a harsh situation without either exaggerating or poeticizing it, "Goodbye, My Brother," written early in his career, is one of his finest stories...

...He leans back, develops perspective, takes a robust interest in other people's lives...

...Despite the rhapsodic thrill of the language, it seems to me one of the least wholesome elements in Cheever's fiction that he so often juxtaposes the pleasing prospect of nature and the disagreeable one of men and women, and lurches so readily from cynicism to exaltation...

...Cheever's sympathies spring unaccountably back to the observer, as if he were personally affronted, violated in his finer sensibilities by the shabby tales he relates...

...He is describing the Shady Hill suburban home to which Francis Weed has just returned after nearly being killed in a plane crash...

...A little girl gives him flowers and the Mayor embraces him...

...The narrator assures him that many American women feel that they have sacrificed career for marriage, and urges him to indulge her...

...The Golden Age" is a delightful memoir of an American television writer who rents a castle in Tuscany and is known in the vicinity as "il poeta...

...In "A Vision of the World," the narrator is in a supermarket picking up some brioches when the piped-in music changes from a love song to a cha-cha and he says to the very plain woman next to him, "Would you like to dance, Madam...

...The narrative is garnished with evocative details, such as the shadow of the maid in a dark garden and the backgammon games after coffee...

...For three decades the legato Cheever prose has remained as urbane and tempting as an ad in the New Yorker, sharing with the magazine that has published nearly all his stories a zealous attention to surfaces, a scrupulous rendition of speech and, not the least of its attractions, a supercilious tone that separates its uncommon reader from the gaucheness and banality of common experience...

...He is like the narrator of "The Seaside Houses," who hardly turns the key of his rented vacation home before he discerns from the dimness of a bulb that his landlord is parsimonious, and from the whiskey bottles in the piano bench that he is a secret drinker and an unhappy man...

...But when the moon comes out he sees some figures ascending toward him...

...and so, while my chains are forged of turf and house paint, they will still bind me till I die...

...But when they undertake their favorite identical subject, the seesaw between tranquility and disturbance in marriage, we see how enormous a role the accident of disposition plays in creating the hierarchy of art...

...A baffling transfiguration indeed, as is the final image in the story about poor Francis Weed trying to recover from his passion for the babysitter by taking up woodwork therapy: A black dog prances through the tomato vines and "Then it is dark...

...Back in the suburbs, Francis Weed (the "country husband") makes a mild bid for his family's attention after his uncomfortable plane flight, but the children are crying, and his wife "paints with lightning strokes the panorama of drudgery in which her youth, beauty and wit have been lost...

...Splendor...

...Although several stories about feminists lay the satire on thickly, "Another Story" is easy to relish...

...What an accomplishment it would have been if he could have added that comfortable frame of mind to the rest of his clear and elegant prose...

...The hearth was swept, the roses on the piano were reflected in the polish of the broad top, and there was an album of Schubert waltzes on the rack...

...He is embarrassed because his situation comedy (Cheever once wrote scripts for Life with Father) is to be shown that night on Italian TV and he will, in this country of simple habits and high art, be exposed as a commercial hack, a harbinger of barbarism and vulgarity...

...Oh, we thought, signore," the Mayor says, "that you were merely a poet...

...Can the author of all this domestic infelicity really believe, as he says in his Preface, that the constants he looks for are "a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being...

...and luckily Cheever is diverse enough a writer to give way more than once, in the midst of his disenchantments, to a comic phrase or notion...

...The prince yields but when his wife gives an appalling recital and then asks him to change his name, he draws the line and, weeping, sails home to Verona...

...Kindness...

...I could conceivably make a life without her and the children but...

...In Italy Cheever grows more springy, outgoing and natural, and the melancholy fog of "pain and sweetness" lifts from his fiction...

...It takes place in a big summer house on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, and is about a family reunion dampened by the arrival of the youngest brother, a censorious New England Savonarola who sees the worst in everyone...

...I cannot divorce myself from the serpentine walk I have laid...

...Cheever has been called the American Chekhov, and it is true that both writers have a ruminative manner, dwell wistfully on lost opportunities, and are masters at conjuring up a mood, an excitation of the nerves, a vapor of unstated emotion hanging in the air...

...A reader may well wonder whether this would have seemed sufficient provocation to Chekhov, Henry James or even Fannie Hurst, but he will discover in this compilation from five earlier volumes stories with no motivation at all, like "A Vision of the World," where the hero, ensconced in a seaside cottage with the grass freshly cut and robins flying by, unreasonably muses: "Oh, I sometimes think of leaving her...

...by a hairy man in white underwear...

...No unhappy ending can stop Cheever's spirits from soaring, however, once Italy enters the scene...

...His heroes and heroines are usually caught in a spiritual flagrante delicto, a bit awkward and pathetic as they come into view through a light frost of derision...

...In 1956 Cheever spent a year in Italy, and what an infusion of red blood and charm the change in setting gives to his writing...

...Nothing here had been neglected," writes John Cheever in "The Country Husband," one of the most characteristic pieces in his new collection, The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf, 693 pp., $15...

...A sense of humor can do wonders for a bilious outlook...

...and for once the landscape—dunes, coarse grass, open sea—enhances rather than diverts us from the austere emotions...

...In "An Educated American Woman," a vigorous old lady with splendid white hair and a red face is designated as a humbug: "the seraphic look she assumed when she listened to music was the look of someone trying to recall an old phone number...

...He does much better when he comes to terms with the blackness in himself, which may be why Falconer, for all the abrasiveness of its cat slaughters and brutalities among prisoners, is a strong and plausible novel...

...If Cheever is no analyst of motive, it may be because he regards the battie of the sexes as too ferocious for psychological interpretation, rooted instead in some primal biological antagonism or some malevolent caprice of the universe...

...Virtue...

...It was not the kind of household where, after prying open a stuck cigarette box, you would find a shirt button and a tarnished nickel...

...Almost before he knows it, Cheever is skating along the boulevard of broken marriages, hemmed in by wives grinding their axes or balefully slamming the bedroom doors in the face of a man in need...

...We sense the Russian writer's intuitive sympathy with all of his characters...

...Writers &Writing THE CHEERLESS WORLD OF JOHN CHEEVER by isa kapp The room was polished and tranquil, and from the windows that opened to the west there was some late-summer sunlight, brilliant and clear as water...

...In "The Season for Divorce" a busy young New York City mother receives a gift of roses from an acquaintance, and that is enough to stir up threatening ripples in domestic waters...

...In the Italian stories—e.g...

...We have to suppose that he simply does not recognize his own saturnine bent of mind, his speedy susceptibility to the faintest intimations of discord, and to the sorrows of gin...

...This reminds the narrator of another friend whose wife has a musical voice yet was sensible enough to use it to get a job as an airport announcer, and here the denouement is even more unnerving: She begins to call her husband to dinner and bed in the same impersonal airport voice she uses to direct passengers to proceed to Gate Seven, and his only recourse is to take flight...