Review: The Stories of John Cheever

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Says Cheever in < href="https://migueltejadaflores.wordpress.... preface, "These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner of the stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being. Calvin played no part at all in my religious education, but his presence seemed to abide in the barns of my childhood and to have left me with some undue bitterness."

I find his nostalgic evocations in his imagined Shady Hill is rather drab and lacking in color, even claustrophobic to me - but Cheever defends his location: "There’s been too much criticism of the middle-class way of life. Life can be as good and rich there as anyplace else. I am not out to be
a social critic, however, nor a defender of suburbia. It goes without saying that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere." (Saturday Review, 1958)

For me, the 61 stories here, then, became a slog - but I fine almost all short story collections eventually formulaic and predictable. I wanted to read this collection ever since enjoying thoroughly the dreamlike film The Swimmer at a repertory film theater twenty-plus years ago. This magical element - more dramatic and affecting for me in the film - marks the most memorable stories here as well as the unavoidable fact that adultery and furtive assignations feature prominently. "Mild-mannered librarian and humorist " Roz Warren sums this up best: "...John Cheever happens to be one of my favorite authors, and it’s certainly true that if you remove all the extra-marital shenanigans from his ouevre, you wouldn’t be left with much more than a symbolic swimming pool and a magic radio."

The magic radio is from "The Enormous Radio" which stands out for in the first part of this book - where the stories seem the most formulaic and this bit of whimsy stands out from the other which blur together. It also reminds me of "Static", episode 56 of The Twilight Zone. Stories I did like in the first part include “The Five-Forty-Eight” which is like a Hitchcock-ian noir. "John Cheever, brilliant chronicler of American suburbia led a tortured double life filled with sexual guilt, alcoholism and self-loathing." ("The demons that drove John Cheever", https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...) This seems to be why the stories featuring sexual guilt, alcoholism, and self-loathing seem the most effective to me -but even that soggy well begins to run dry in the re-telling. At best I can say Cheever here in the first part proves he can delineate the indescribable - the vagaries of loss and inexplicable self-destructible impulse in the human condition

Part two starts for me with "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear", which seems to me to be Cheever making a clean break with the past formula and giving me hope in the tedium. This part has the most experimental and varied stories of the collection which are thus, to me, the most entertaining. Highpoints for me included the fantasy "Metamorphoses", the graffiti vision "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin", and of course "The Swimmer".

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