Cheever, John (Vol. 7) - Cheever, John 1912–
Cheever, John 1912–
Cheever is "a Chekhov of the suburbs"—with a touch of the absurd, the fantastical. An American, he is well-known for his New Yorker stories and his Wapshot novels. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
[The] narrow thread on which happiness in the suburbs depends all are images of Cheever's sense of the modern fate. The turns in his stories, though, cannot be dismissed as tricks but must be given their due as repeated statements of the lack of connection between cause and effect. (p. 550)
Cheever is trying to handle his knowledge of human nature in the still recognizable Transcendentalist way. For Emerson, evil is an illusion; it is the lack of good and how can the lack of something be real? The argument can sound like a sophistical gimmick, the philosophical equivalent of Cheever's tricky endings. The voice of authorial wonder in Cheever's fiction is his device for refusing to acknowledge...
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