John Cheever (1912 – 1982), sometimes called “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” was a novelist and short story writer. He is considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. His novels include The Wapshot Chronicle (1958), The Wapshot Scandal (1965), Bullet Park (1969) and Falconer (1977), but he is likely best remembered for his classic short stories. He put out more than six short story collections, including The World of Apples (1973), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in my Next Novel (1961), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), The Enormous Radio (1953) and, the oldest of all, The Way Some People Live (1942).
The Stories of John Cheever
The compilation, The Stories of John Cheever, earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Some of the more famous stories include: The Country Husband (winner of the O’Henry award), Five Forty-Eight (winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and, of course, The Swimmer, Cheever’s most celebrated story of all time. The collection, almost 700 pages, includes almost all of his stories.
Cheever's Perspective on Suburbia
Cheever's setting in the collection is almost always suburbia (often “Shady Hill”). His stories suggest that in the outskirts of the city there are colonies of people struggling to face the chaos of the modern world and the nuanced troubles in their own homes. Cheever is famous for exposing the various layers of suburban life; rather than avoiding these as “boring” subjects, he exposes what really goes on.
This is true in his older stories, for example, in "The Enormous Radio", where a woman listens to arguments all through her apartment building on the radio, only to end up arguing exactly like those unhappy persons. It is also true in his later stories, such as "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", where a man breaks into his neighbor’s house for money.
The Conflict Between the Social Self and Inner Turmoil
Cheever often deals with the conflict between the social self, the outward self, and the inner turmoil of a character (or set of characters). In The Worm in the Apple, Cheever opens with these lines:
The Crutchmans were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only meant to conceal the gravity and the depth of the infection (285).
A Beautiful Surface With an Ugly Underbelly
Though "The Worm in the Apple" never actually exposes any deep-rooted unhappiness, it touches, with a satirical tone, on the root of many Cheever stories: the beautiful surface with ugliness underneath. Cheever writes about unhappy people, generally, people who drink a lot, who lie, who have affairs and have problems with money. They are not respectable people, for the most part, but they do evoke a certain human sympathy, one of Cheever’s trademarks. This combination of despair and compassion is woven through many of his stories, woven with articulate, yet creative language.
Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever. (Vintage, 2000, ISBN: 978-0375724428)
Clarissa Caldwell - Clarissa Caldwell lives, reads and writes in Walla Walla, Washington. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of ...
