There are occasional touches of self-importance in [The Stories of John Cheever], but the author has always been very much on his guard against their recurrence and so—being tremendously gifted—he has reaped the true, substantial rewards of lightness. Not disabled by high-mindedness about content or form, his stories have made a brilliant and serious contribution to the genre….

The particular brand of self-importance Cheever had to resist in the early stories was moralistic. Crudely speaking, he was liable to sudden outbursts of severity about booze in the metropolitan stories (see "The Sorrows of Gin") and about sex in the suburban ones (see "Just Tell Me Who it Was", or "Brimmer"—which moves on to the Italian setting)….

Cheever is also occasionally betrayed into a note of self-importance about technique. This is natural, since he has something highly original and thoughtful to offer here, especially in certain remarkable stories written since 1960. The secret of these is an unwinding or disintegrating structure, such that the narrative development—like a film run backwards—generates more and more components that require assembly, rather than undertaking the assembly itself. In the early instances of "Boy in Rome" and "A Vision of the World" this procedure is associated with a rather leaden and disingenuous commentary by the author. In the later, extraordinary story "Montraldo" a much greater degree of disintegration of structure is handled with complete nonchalance.

This art of loose ends is not a gimmick. Terms such as "chain" and "connection" appear frequently in Cheever's own remarks about his fiction, and he is referring to a new, difficult kind of connectedness—which is necessarily antagonistic to the tidiness so lethal to the short story form. Cheever knows—and brilliantly conveys as early as the end of "The Sorrows of Gin"—how disorderly the human mind is, how much closer we are than we usually acknowledge to dreaming even in waking life.