“He was a spy in his own world,” says a son of the late, great literary WASP, John Cheever. Spies keep secrets and live multiple lives. One of Cheever’s best kept secrets, according to Charles McGrath in a recent New York Times Magazine article, is that he “was not a traditional, naturalistic writer.” Instead, he was “a writer pressing against the very limits of realism itself. The stories are always edging into myth.”McGrath recommends as most magical, the novel Bullet Park, and the short stories “The Swimmer” and “The Enormous Radio.”
Cheever is in the news because of a new biography and the re-release of his novels and collected stories by the Library of America. Literary historian Blake Bailey authors the first and edits the latter. He is a one-man machine working to polish the waning luster of Cheever’s reputation. The goal is to get Cheever into the “canon,” to establish him as one of the 20th century’s greats of fiction. The sad truth is that unless a writer is taught on college campuses, he or she falls out of print and sinks into obscurity.
Of course technology may soon change that paradigm – with the promise of keeping an author perpetually accessible.
McGrath’s article laments how Cheever was “typecast” during his lifetime as “a ‘New Yorker writer,’ someone who wrote blandly for and about middle-class suburbanites.” (I would amend that part to upper-middle class.) Yes, Cheever did chronicle a lot of mink-wearing, martini-sipping housewives, their train-commuting professional husbands, and their privately-schooled 2.5 children. But the suburb he invented for his characters was, again according to McGrath, “a mythic realm that is Heaven and Hades both — a corrupt Eden, a hell of seductive beauty.”
Add John Cheever to the unlikely list of MR WASPs.
Bonus: Watch a video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett.
4 comments:
Oh, I *loved* The Swimmer and The Enormous Radio. Haven't read that particular novel of his yet, but now I must!
I've just started it. Eerie and disjointed. Omniscient POV, but by a god who might benefit from Ritalin.
Good points!
Finished BULLET PARK. Here's the review I posted on LibraryThing.com (my favorite, favorite book database):
A serious, hilarious, quirky, disjointed allegory about 1960s upper-middle-class suburbs -- a spiritual story about people who have lost their connection to spirituality. Hermetic tropes include the 'magic Negro' faith-healer who lives over a funeral parlor in the slums, two alchemists with different sorts of laboratories, a fairy tale bastard raised by a rich fairy grandmother, a sacrificial first-born son, the summoning of erotic spirits, a variety of impossible-to-please 'White Goddess' women alternately known as bitches. Characters drink so much hard liquor I came away from the book with a contact buzz -- perhaps contact alcohol poisoning.
The narrator remains a mystery person. In Part I, s/he maintains an anonymous presence while telling us, the readers, the history and trials of suburbanite Eliot Nailles. ('Our name used to be de Noailles.' p 20) Part II is a written record made by the outsider, Paul Hammer, (yes, Hammer and Nailles is a purposeful pun) and addressed, apparently, to that same unnamed, unknown narrator. Part III is quick and brief. The narrator shows us the inevitable intersection of the two men's lives -- insider and outsider, conventional and anarchic, self and shadow.
The word 'stranger' recurs throughout the story. In one section, the protagonist Nailles is quoted at length, as he retells a significant evening with his 17 year old only child. Father and son go to an abandoned miniature golf course which serves as a gothic setting for their encounter. The shabby links are a favorite haunt of 'men and boys' on summer evenings. (113) Nailles says:
It was windy, as I say, and there was more thunder and it looked like rain and the light on the course was failing so you really couldn't see the faces of the men who played through. They were high school kids, I guess, slum kids, hoods, whatever, wearing tight pants and trick shirts and hair grease. They had spooky voices, they seemed to pitch them in a way that made them sound spooky, and when one of them was addressing the ball another gave him a big goose and he backed right into it, making groaning noises. It isn't that I dislike boys like that really, it's just that they mystify me, they frighten me because I don't know where they come from and I don't know where they're going and if you don't know anything about people it's like a terrible kind of darkness. I'm not afraid of the dark but there are some kinds of human ignorance that frighten me. When I feel this, I've noticed that if I can look into the face of the stranger and get some clue to the kind of person he is I feel better but, as I say, it was getting dark and you couldn't see the faces of any of these strangers as they played through. (116-7)
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