The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever
Summary
More than sixty stories in the order he wrote them, from the late 1940s to the 1970s, covering the same ground so consistently that reading them through becomes a kind of biography.
The ground is the commuter suburb north of New York and the people who moved there after the war: the evening train out of Grand Central, the cocktail party, the swimming pool, the housemaid, the mortgage, the marriage that is not going to hold. Cheever gets filed as the chronicler of that world and he was in fact its saboteur. A radio starts broadcasting the neighbours' private lives. A respectable man decides to burgle the houses on his own street. Another man sets out to swim home across every pool in the county and finds that the season and his life have moved on without him.
The Swimmer is the one everybody reads, and it is worth knowing that it looks like a realist story for about six pages and then quietly stops being one.
The prose is beautiful and quick and mostly cheerful in tone, which makes the drops in it land hard. He can put a man's whole ruin in one clause about the weather.
Nearly seven hundred pages. Nobody should read it end to end: the drinking, the ageing brothers and the disappointed wives recur because his life did.
Best for readers who want the American short story between Hemingway and Carver, and who like a writer who is funny right up to the point where he is not.
Historical Context & Significance
The Stories of John Cheever appeared in 1978, sold in numbers almost unheard of for a story collection, and won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The paperback took a National Book Award in 1981.
It arrived at the end of a recovery. Cheever had been drinking himself to death for years, nearly died of pulmonary oedema in 1973, and stopped in 1975 after treatment in New York. Falconer, the prison novel he wrote sober, put him on the cover of Newsweek in 1977, and this book confirmed the comeback. He died in 1982 at seventy.
The collection is selective, leaving out most of his early magazine work. What it could not include came later, when his journals and letters were published and made public a bisexual life and a degree of self loathing his public manner had concealed. Blake Bailey's 2009 biography made that the standard account, and readers now go back to the stories looking for what is hidden inside them, which is generally there.