Reading About John Cheever

 I read John Cheever while in pretrial detention. I had his complete short stories for years, going off to prison seemed like a good time to read him. I knew of him as a great short story writer. This opinion I will not contest, but until today I thought I was the only one who thought him a very strange writer. Today, I read Zone of Strangeness: On John Cheever’s Subjective Suburbs by Adam O’Fallon Price, and published by The Millions.

But Yates’s world, however dated it may be in 2017, is the world we live in.  Cheever’s is not our world and never was.  I have no way to verify this, but I suspect in the ’50s he was misread as well, though misread more widely.  He seems to be writing about the Westchester suburbs — Shady Lawn and Bullet Park, with their sloping lawns and cocktail parties populated by characters recognizable as ur-Don Drapers, ur-Roger Sterlings.  Except as we read, the landscape distorts, the familiar becomes strange.  Cheever’s stories are, to put it simply, strange, and in them, the Mad Men may really be mad.

Take “The Swimmer,” his most famous and familiar.  Neddy Merrill, half-cocked on gin and tonics during a restorative summer brunch at the house of some friends, decides to return home through several miles of Connecticut exurb by swimming the lengths of contiguous pools.  Thus begins a minor odyssey during which we watch as Neddy makes his way, first in drunken delight, but then through rainstorms, colder weather, and the hostility of former friends, gradually growing old and infirm, finally arriving home to find it deserted.

What is going on here?  In fiction, when unreal elements appear, usually one of two things is happening.  In the first case, the unreal actually is real.  This describes much of genre fiction, in which the reader expects vampires and aliens to appear — would, in fact, be disappointed if they didn’t.  In literary fiction, too, the unreal may be introduced with a straight face, for effect.  Magical realism depends on the introduction of a fantastic element into otherwise grim reality, for instance in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”  The appearance of an angel in a poor Colombian village creates a host of consequences, though a crucial difference between magical realism and, say, fantasy, is that in magical realism the narrative is primarily interested in the village, while in fantasy the author would focus primarily on the old man, his wings, how he got them, and what his home world is like.

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As a social critic, Cheever can be read, therefore, as simultaneously transgressive and conservative.  On the one hand, the twin treadmills of suburban family life and postwar American consumerism stifle the human spirit.  These visions represent a reaching beyond the borders of societal expectation for something rare and ineffable:  sexual, religious, often both.  The implication being that there is no adequate means for people to fulfill themselves within the boundaries of their normal life.  Once a Cheever protagonist deviates, they deviate wholly, as in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” in which Johnny Hake is fired and begins plundering the homes of his neighbors for cash.  A corollary implication here would be how thin the line is between normal and the freakishly abnormal, how little occupiable space exists between the two.

But this view of life, with the forces of madness held at bay only by an adherence to work and marriage is, itself, inherently conservative, in both its diagnosis of disease and prescription for cure.  After all, given a binary choice between dull routine and utter chaos, most people will chose the former, and this mostly holds true in Cheever’s stories.  Johnny Hake is wracked with guilt and, reinstalled in his previous position, returns the money he’s stolen.  Francis Weed takes up penitent basement carpentry as a dull corrective while outside, dryads caper in the moonlit shadows of his garden.  In a similar backyard, the Chimera, Olga, emerges a last time from the edge of darkened woods, staggering and bleeding, seemingly battered by her imaginer’s self-judgment.

Yep, that all makes sense when you read the stories. Let us see how broadly we can  pry the way of writing a story.

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