The Stories of John Cheever

Rating:
Summary: A Great Collection from One of the Masters of the Form
Review: Sixty one stories are collected in these nearly 700 pages of short story brilliance. The majority of these stories average around ten pages and all reach some sort of conclusion--in other words, these tales don't appear to be part of some bigger story where the reader is left hanging. Each story stands well on its own.
These well-told vignettes often end badly (for the characters, not the reader) but they give a timeless and perceptive glimpse into humanity. Particularly revealing (these stories were written between the late 1940s and early 1970s) under Cheever's trenchent pen are the lifestyles of Northeast America's affluent. Troubled relationships (parent-child, sibling, spousal, lovers, friends, etc.) are the focus of the majority of these tales and each sheds light on the behavior of mankind and the effect of choices made (both right and wrong). Most of these stories are set in wealthy suburbs or overseas where the characters are usually stocked with cash and often boozed to the hilt. As you might imagine, not all ends well.
In short, these are some of the best short stories ever written, each revealing in its own way and told with beauty and grace by one of America's greatest writers. Highly Recommended.

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Summary: Stories of family and friends
Review: Stories of family and friends that incorporate life's normal occurrences and provide a feeling that we all experience the same things.

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Summary: JUST TWO WORDS AND ENOUGH SAID
Review: The Bible

Rating:
Summary: The Maximum Impact with the Minimal Prose
Review: The late John Cheever could not only tell a story well. He also could make each word count to ultimately paint a complex portrait of a certain type of person and his life, (less often her life). This was the upperclass, or marginal thereto, person who when in a city was in New York and when in the suburbs went by train to CT. Even more telling though was that Cheever's eye could see in a person's smallest gesture, or his passingest moment, everything you would ever need to know about him. Cheever exposed the underside of what was going on in life for this person. The world might seem sunny and simple when a Cheever story begins but by its end the world is rendered in all its complexity in the sparest of prose. I read Cheever's novels too but it was in his short stories that his genius as a writer shone forth best. Each story in this collection is stunning and well worth owning forever.

Rating:
Summary: Near perfect account of a lost way of American life
Review: The narrow slice of America and the privileged Americans about whom Cheever writes are mostly long-gone--gone with the second World War, with the ubiquitous wearing of hats by men, with prettiness and ladylike ways the only surface requirements for women, with drinking accompanied by secrecy and shame, with country clubs as the center of social lives. Yet the stories resonate still because they are so gorgeously crafted that they rise above the details which might otherwise date them. "Goodbye My Brother" stands, to my mind, as one of the finest examples of the American short story ever written. In its pages you will find family, jealousy, adultery, childhood grievances spilling over into late adulthood arguments, drinking, ignorance of great privilege, bad behavior, card games, beach houses, and patrician resolve to ignore all indiscretion. Though you will find the same elements in many other Cheever stories, his brilliance is in his ability to hew different stories by the dozen out of essentially the same basic ingredients. Despite their similarities, his stories each stand on their own, little wonders of detail. Each story is a different shake of the same kaleidoscope. This collection is marvelous, and provides long-term satisfaction and wonderment at Cheever's talent.

Rating:
Summary: An American dreamer
Review: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Highly recommended.

John Cheever has long had a reputation as the quintessential American writer of the 20th century, and this collection, which he edited, is illustration of why he is a favourite of the American literati.

Cheever's stories are populated by mostly mundane people in mundane settings-the corporate executive and rising stars who go home every night to an affluent suburb like Shady Hill, with its unforgettable recurring cast of characters (the Beardens, the Farquarson, the Parminters) who live on such unforgettable streets as Alewives Lane; the New York City elevator operator whose life consists of going up and down all day and whose mind and imagination never leave their comfortable paths; other apartment building workers, half of whose lives are spent on the fringe of luxury and the other half in grimy poverty; the thoughtless affluent who cannot conceive of any other life; the downwardly mobile who have no choice but to lower their level of existence closer to that of their former servants and who cannot seem to grasp that things will never be what they once were; the social outcasts, like Mrs. Hewing, who is "kind of immoral"; the former duchesses and other members of the old European elite who wear their rags with grace while their estate homes crumble around them; the expatriates who fit in neither where they come from nor where they live; and the travelers who find tragedy awaits at the end of the trip with the death of their child-or even the beginning of the journey of their doomed marriage.

What sets the stories and the characters-and Cheever-apart is the surreal nature of so much of what happens in the course of these vignettes. Instead of addressing an addiction like alcoholism directly, Cheever tells of an ordinary woman who cannot stop listening to her neighbours as their lives, their arguments, their loves, and their passions are voiced over a new radio her husband has bought for her in "The Enormous Radio." The birth and course of the affliction are seamlessly revealed through Irene Westcott's inability to withdraw from vicariously living through her neighbours' conversations. "The Five-Forty-Eight" reveals how an ordinary event-sexual relations between executive and assistant-can lead to the humiliation of a confident, secure man, who finds himself falling into the filth, while the disturbed and wronged ex-assistant is finally free of the demons he helped to feed while ignorant of their existence. In "The Swimmer," which takes place on a Sunday where the recurring refrain is, "I drank too much" can be heard at every home, Neddy Merrill decides to go home from a party by swimming across the county through all the pools in between his host's home and his own-a novel idea taken to its surreal level as the weather and the trees change, and Neddy finds himself lost in a world where he knows what has become of himself but not how or why.

The world of John Cheever is primarily male; the vast majority of the stories are told by a man in the first person. The women whom they encounter range from their tired wives to their enigmatic lovers-and, in the case of the third of "Three Stories," an enigmatic wife. Sex is central to many of the tales; the happily and the miserably married are in many cases equally open to sexual adventure and excitement if occasionally afraid of the consequences. It is the rare protagonist who would voice the thoughts of one incidental character: "After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps." ("The Country Husband")

It is fascinating to watch Cheever's subjects and style evolve from the 1920s and '30s to the 1960s-from an era of elevator men, fedoras, ubiquitous cigarettes, Martinis (with a capital "M"), and "affairs" to a time when "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger" can refer to the sexual act by its most unacceptable term and be whisked off to Washington, D.C., for making the mistake of falling in love in the U.S.S.R.

The surfaces here are untroubled, but the depths roil with repressed thoughts and emotions that are typical of Shady Hill and its ilk-but are neither acknowledged nor acceptable. Nearly everyone, whether they live in New York, Shady Hill, or Rome, is desperately seeking something-love, sex, passion, something-anything-to lift them above the towers of the city skyline where they work and the chimneys of the suburban trap they cannot-and really do not wish to-escape. An empty life is still a life of social acceptability.

Diane L. Schirf, 1 September 2002.

Rating:
Summary: Universal themes in a specific time and setting
Review: There are twelve stories in this collection that I deem classics, tales of Americans who are preyed upon by a misguided notion of the American Dream of eternal youth, endless self-re-invention, and opulence. To counterpoint this dream of infinite freedom and excess is the the Puritan impulse of repression, so that the characters are tormented by a contradiction: the need to live out their Dionysian fantasies and the need to scour those excesses with their Puritan background. My favorite stories, "Torch Song," "The Swimmer," "Pot of Gold," "The Country Husband," Goodbye, My Brother," and "The Enormous Radio," dramatize this conflict between people carried away with a twisted version of the American Dream and how this dream, a delusion, eats away at them until they're hanging on a thread. Some see the error their ways in time; most do not.

This is my favorite American short story collection, rivalled only by the short stories of Tobias Wolff.

Rating:
Summary: one of the best
Review: There are two art forms that are American in origin: jazz and the short story. And when you think of the best short story writers, you think of Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. Cheever has been called the Chekhov of the American short story. Cheever's stories deal with suburban life, but with a bit of surrealism in it. And this Pulitzer prize winning collection is a must have on any list. It contains two of the best short stories ever written, "The Swimmer" and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Some of the other of Cheever's best are: "The Enormous Radio", "Torch Song", "The Cure", "The Sorrows of Gin", "O Youth and Beauty!", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", "The Worm in the Apple", "The Country Husband", "The Scarlet Moving Van", "The Music Teacher", "The Brigadier and Gold Widow", "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger". These short stories will show why Cheever is one of America's best.

Rating:
Summary: Strikes a chord
Review: These stories are about the everyday lives of extraordinary people. The appeal to one's own sense of tragic glory that one sees in the Cheever's characters is supremely effective. But the greatest accomplishment in these stories is the juxtaposition of completely rational plots worked through rationally by confoundingly coplex characters. Cheever's peel back the pretense of American WASPs and show us the bare souls of men we would otherwise be content to avoid and dismiss.

Rating:
Summary: As close to perfect as American literature gets
Review: These stories are the most wonderful things I've ever read. This book impresses itself upon you and takes you, if only for awhile, back in time, to the New York that his characters knew. They (his characters) are people of extreme sophistication, intelligence, grace, beauty, wealth, and priveledge, but are no less human than you or I. They are just parts of this collage about the ironies of everyday life. Buy this book. The awards and renown it has received can't lie- The Stories of John Cheever ARE some of the best short stories ever published by an American, including Poe, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald. It is perfection.