Non-fiction > Recommendation > Post Road Magazine
The Stories of John Cheever
It was almost something—anything—by Borges and then a brief flirtation with Capote, but I returned to my original love, my well-trod, easy love: The Stories of John Cheever.
I say “easy” because so many writers have cited Cheever’s work as canonical, but I’m finally past the age when the undiscovered is believed to be more authentic, and I don’t care that he’s sometimes criticized as a product of his era—the martini and cigarette era, we can call it—or that he’s the Cassandra of suburban angst, or that he could write superb short stories but his novels were mediocre. At his best—sober, focused—there was nobody better. He was not a titan like Hemingway or Faulkner, but there’s room in the pantheon for gods of all types. We reserve a temple for him.
The first time I read Cheever (fifteen years ago?) it felt like eavesdropping on an adult conversation, involving very serious, sad people who leave most of the important stuff unsaid, and I remember thinking how amazing that was: a writer could make his characters say everything without saying much. Even better, a writer could have faith in his reader’s ability to know what wasn’t said, and why. This was a revelation. It still is. Of course, he flexed his muscles when needed, and the results—especially to my twenty-year-old self—were equal parts devastation and joy:
Odette has black hair and black eyes. She is careful never to expose her white skin to the sun for long, so the striking contrast of blackness and pallor is not changed in the summer. She needs and deserves attention—it is the element that contents her—and she will flirt, unseriously, with any man.
-Goodbye, My Brother
The Stories of John Cheever keeps going. You wait for him to run out of ideas, to recycle a mood or a character, but he doesn’t. Someone leaves home, someone returns; a wife realizes her husband is a stranger; a businessman has an affair. Such stories are shiny with use—we’ve read them all before, and wonder what’s the point of reading them again. Until we pick up his stories. Then it’s all new, as if we’ve never read about love or loss, or heard someone describe a woman sighing behind a closed bedroom door.
Originally published in Post Road , issue #21
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