ROBERT OTTAWAY
Few swan-songs from any important writer of fiction can have been as well-tuned as [Oh What a Paradise It Seems]. In these 100 pages, John Cheever … with perfectly pleasurable art provides us with an epitaph to his working life, and the theme that stoked it for 40 years. He once described it as 'the terrible beauty of the world, and the pain of those who reach after it as it disappears'….
The polluting spread of urban greed, and of arid metropolitan attitudes to love and the modes of happiness, was a constant preoccupation of his.
...Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©1983 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 414 words.)
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