The Stories of John Cheever

Try reading John Cheever all summer and working at a country club. That'll mess with you.

Alcoholism, Adultery, Abjection/Depression [orig. 5/19/16]Maybe I'd appreciate these stories more if I were cultured enough to enjoy reading of sadness, broken lives and shattered dreams. I loved three story collections from a few years ago which also had a melancholy bent:Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson, Thirteen Ways of Looking: Fiction by Colum McCann, and The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories by Anthony Marra. For me, their difference from Cheever's stories-taken as a whole--are their [...]

John Cheever is a brilliant raconteur – one of my most favourite. He excellently knows the stuff our lives are made of.Although this entire anthology is a gold mine, The Swimmer and The Day the Pig Fell into the Well seems to be my preferred nuggets.This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done well made her sink back in her chair [...]

October 2009Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδεκείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. I'm not a very good student of History. I haven't read Herodotus, or Thucydides, or the other great classical historians. But I did see 300, and I spent about five minutes on , so I know a little about the Battle of Thermopylae. There's a monument there, at the site of the battle, with a neat little epitaph in Greek (see above) w [...]

These stories are primarily about people who suck, but who somehow manage to maintain the appearance of people who don't suck. Eventually, they push their luck and are exposed. Then all the neighbors gossip about them, because it's better to keep the focus on the suckers who've been found out and hope no one finds out you suck just as bad, or worse. So why am I giving five stars to a collection of stories about people who mostly suck? Because John Cheever DOESN'T suck. He absurdifies common emot [...]

I have been reading this book for 18 months. This isn't the kind of book you just grab and set down and read from cover to cover just like I wouldn't think most people would grab the collected works of Shakespeare and read it one brilliant play after brilliant play. I have enjoyed having Cheever by my bedside always available when I needed a break from my other reading endeavors. Cheever is one of those writers that equally encourages me to write and at the same time convinces me that I have no [...]

The demons that drove John Cheever (Rachel Cooke) | Books | The Observer - ow/vIeYv¿Por qué la vida es para algunos un exquisito privilegio mientras que otros tienen que pagar por asistir al teatro del mundo un precio de cólera, pesadillas e infecciones? No debemos querer otras cosas aparte de nuestra ocasional comprensión de la muerte y el volcánico amor que nos impulsa a unirnos los unos con los otros. A menudo mi mujer está triste porque su tristeza no es suficientemente intensa; se ape [...]

La radio fantasmaLeggere questi racconti comporta entrare in contatto con l'inevitabile consapevolezza del mistero della letteratura. Si cerca qualcosa mentre in realtà l'ultima cosa che si desidera è il raggiungerla. Per questo Cheever fa parlare attraverso le pagine i suoi fantasmi, cosciente di metterli in ascolto delle ombre del lettore, come attraverso una radio doppiamente spettrale. Niente suona così familiare come le lievi e allegre apocalissi dei suoi personaggi, i loro pentimenti vi [...]

I racconti di Cheever (molti suoi racconti) sono piccoli quadri pressoché perfetti di vita borghese e quotidiana. All'inizio, guardando il quadro, si nota a volte la luce radiosa, la serenità, la mollezza, la piacevolezza del vivere - ma osservando meglio si nota un'incrinatura, un qualcosa di inquietante, che ci opprime, non sappiamo bene cosa, ma decisamente rompe la serenità, e d'un tratto ci accorgiamo che getta una luce completamente diversa sull'immagine: crepuscolare, malinconica, a vo [...]

We read Cheever not because we love stories about the suburbs, but because Cheever shows us that a wild imagination can’t be bound even by the suburbs. We enjoy the quality of observation, the dialogue, the air-tight construction (and what he teaches us about form both in every example and over the course of the collection), but we read him for those moments when his stories take wing to escape cliche, banality, and the mundane.A few more thoughts on Cheever:alisonkinney/2014/07/01/joThanks!

August 22, 2015As predicted (see earlier two posts, below), it took me months to finish this masterpiece. To reiterate earlier comments, I read from front to back as well as back to front. Not the best idea, it turns out, because the strongest stories are not in the middle. I'm adding this note for two reasons:First, I googled the one story in sixty-one that I didn't think worked, and I found a wonderful New Yorker piece by Brad Leithauser about Cheever's style and turn of phrase. I was a drama [...]

This author would be in my top twenty list of all time masters of the short story.I like a lot of "uncool" authors like Cheever, Hawthorne, Carverese are authors I read decade in, decade out, and keep coming away with new experiences, thoughts, the whole palimpsestic layering which is life many books and authors achieve a fashionable momentbut I think it's obviously timeliness AND timelessness that have to be achieved to really merit that overused term "masterpiece"or whatever your favorite term [...]

I have been reading the short stories now for a long time. I'm not finished yet but sometime I will because they are so good. The stories are placed in New England or New York. There doesn't happen much in the stories on first sight ( I mean not a lot of action) but they are focused on the relations between people. Characterisation, conversation, exploring the relation between people that's what it's all about. And Cheever is a master in it.

Note: The following is not a review of the entire collection. Rather, it's of one of the stories, probably the shortest, in the collection. This story alone, in my view, merits a five-star rating, representative of the rest.Reunion by John CheeverThe New Yorker Fiction Podcast couldn't have chosen a better specimen of short fiction for its inaugural episode. Aired on May 3, 2007, and hosted by The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the episode featured Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford [...]

Dear Mr. Cheever,While it is unfair 0f me t0 put y0ur b00k 0n my "read" shelf when in fact I 0nly read ab0ut 400 0ut 0f 693 pages, I feel the time has c0me f0r us t0 part.Y0u are n0t f0r me, Mr. Cheever, th0ugh I tried. Y0u never break 0pen the hearts 0f y0ur characters, which leaves me irritable and half-satisfied. I keep waiting t0 turn the page 0n s0mething m0ment0us, s0mething that will cause my little spirit t0 rise 0r sink with dreadful, unst0ppable m0ti0n. At best, Mr. Cheever, y0u caused [...]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As a general rule, it can be said that the newer an artistic movement, the more difficult it is to fully understand it, because of a lack of both historical distance and "how it really happened" stories regarding important turning points; given this, then, I suppose it's safe to call Postmodernism, history's l [...]

John Cheever the best American short story writer of the 20th century. Not IMHO. I already did not like his novel Falconer and the best stories in this collection are entertaining yes, but there are equally many that do not make sense to me. I read that the author never planned what he wrote, just let it happen, following his intuition. The result is that half of the stories lack direction, contain digressions that lead nowhere and a lot of loose threads are kept lying around. The stories set in [...]

By chance, because a friend recommended it, I watch the film 'The Swimmer. ' It destroyed me for some odd reason. It is then that I picked up "Collected Stories and Other Writings by Cheever, who was a writer I never even bothered thinking - due to me that he seemed to be a writer in a very boring time in U.S. literary contemporary history. Boy was I wrong. He's an incredible writer, and his short stories are like knife stabs in an opened wound. The first story I read was "The Swimmer," because [...]

Its pretty amazing but this book kept me interested for all 1004 pages of writing. I agreed to read this book as a buddy read with my friend, Tajma. (Don't read this, Tajma, but I really expected I wouldn't like it!) Surprise, surprise. I loved most of Cheever's short stories, preferring his mid-career stories to the later years. I didn't care for his essays in the back of the book much - I believe he writes fiction much better. This is how much I loved this book: I can't pick a favorite story. [...]

In the same vein as Updike and precursor to the "dirty-realism" of Carver, Cheever betrays our expectations by presenting a class of people that on the surface of things have life together. Through unpretentious plots and simple syntax, he stuns his readers by revealing catastrophic and devastating results in otherwise innocuous scenarios. It is almost a form of voyeurism the way he reveals the reality behind our neighbors closed doors. A phenomenal author and unique, revealing perception of Ame [...]

Where the hell have I been, this guy's a fucking genius. "Torch Song" is amazing, "The Chaste Clarissa" is hysterical, and the asshole elevator boy on Xmas day story has to be read to be believed. Cheever's sense of deadpan humor is sharp as a knife, "The Superintendent" being a great example. I'm only on page 200 but this is pure fucking gold.

This book starts with a man who almost kills his brother, mainly because he misunderstands the brother. It finishes with a wife who poisons her husband and gets away with it. Cheever writes like an entomologist - his characters are beetles and butterflies who he skewers with a pin before fastening them to the page. But Cheever doesn't seem to have any love for his bugs. Rather, if he feels much of anything for them, he tends to despise them. Often, when they are not thinking about killing one an [...]

No one captures the imperfections of suburban, white collar, white bread America like Cheever does. No one. Well, especially in the North. If O'Connor is the Queen of South Suburbia, Cheever is the King of North Suburbia."The Swimmer," of course, is his pièce de résistance in this collection, and with good reason - I've been in love with unreliable narrators since. "The Five-Forty-Eight" is another favorite of mine, as is "The Geometry of Love" (loved it so much it's where my AIM screen name c [...]

This is kind of a cheater review since I didn’t finish the book (this may happen at some point, though it will not be in the immediate future), but not finishing it left me with a few things to say, so here we are. First, I have to say that I didn’t stop reading because I don’t like the writing. Cheever can render characters content in their discontent with the best of them, and I never expected him to be so funny. I didn’t mark many quotes, but here are two just for kicks: “When you g [...]

The stories in this book were inconsistent. The best were masterpieces of the short fiction form. The worst seemed like quick hack jobs to make a deadline. I was irresistibly drawn to the Shady Hill stories, of which there were far too few. On the other hand, I frequently wished that he would get over his Italian obsession and write about New York again. He seemed to have been at his best when writing conservatively with an experimental flair ("The Swimmer" is the perfect example). I do think th [...]

Cheever, John. COLLECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS. (2009). *****. Timed to come out at about the same time as the biography written by the editor of this volume, Blake Bailey, this is a comprehensive collection by the Library of America. It also has a companion volume that collects Cheever’s novels that you will be seeing on these pages someday soon. In addition to the stories that have been previously collected in “The Stories of John Cheever,” (1978), which I have in my collection, thi [...]

From "Goodbye, My Brother""Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming -- Diana and Helen -- and [...]

John Cheever's short stories are peeling away at the decay of American suburbia. The dreams, desires and small victories and defeats of every day life make up for a bitter sweet, strong collection of stories, the best of which I did not think was The Swimmer, although obviously it's still a great one. His ability to highlight the cracks on our surface is admirable and all the characters are human and humane. A good read.

I read this in bits and pieces over a year and a half, and I'm glad I read it that way. If I had tried reading it straight thru I would have tired of Cheever, or at least of his recurring theme of the hidden heartaches of upper middle class suburbia. I first picked this up when I was 19 and can remember reading it on a bus to Cape Cod, but I was not emotionally ready for it at that time. During this reading I developed an appreciation and respect for Cheever's elegant prose style and his depicti [...]

This is actually my second time through this book, though the first time, years upon years back, I hadn't given it the attention I should have. I knew some Cheever classics, but my attetnion span in getting through this tome was not my best fresh out of graduate school, so this time I gave it a 7-month try to let me be ready to sit down and work at Cheever's pace through these stories. Cheever was one of the kings of suburban misery, but mostly in the latter half of this collection. Cheever hims [...]