We have been here before, in Cheever country, and it is fine [in "Oh What a Paradise It Seems"] to return. Ordinary people, who keep seed in the bird-feeding station and who do not see that playing golf and raising flowers are depraved, undergo an inexplicable test of heart. They are attacked in "that sense of sanctuary that is the essence of love." They dared to imagine that pain and suffering were "a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe," and then the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and their children are suddenly refugees, right here on Hitching Post Lane.

There are pluses and minuses when a writer repeats himself. Those of us who were dismayed by the heroin addiction, homosexuality and convenient miracles of "Falconer" will be relieved to see him skating again on familiar ice. When Ezekiel ("God strengthens") went to prison for killing his brother, it was as if Chekov—and Cheever is our Chekov—had ducked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing the cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. Hadn't we had enough of the fire alarms of modernism?

Cheever goes here to the supermarket instead of prison. A woman tries to push too many items through the express checkout, and an old man objects: "I just can't stand to see someone take advantage of other people's kindness. It's like fascism…. People like you cause wars."

This is perfect Cheever; it is perfect, period.

And graduate students of the master will be thrilled by "netherness" and "portability," which they can add to "sanctuary" and "trespass" on their list of emotions in the "gypsy culture" of the American exurbs that Cheever anthropologizes. He is, of course, the poet of our displacement, our sense of a lost past and a "sacred grove," our feeling that we came from another country and left a better self behind, like unclaimed baggage….

But Cheever's critics will complain once more of his sweet tooth for the lyrical, of too many nights "where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." Where is politics? Where is history? The ghetto and the camps? Are the displacements and paroxysms of the exurbs just an accident, a mere failure of luck or charm or nerve? Ought not the bourgeoisie to be punished for sins more grievous than "carnal importunacy"? Who can afford a skating rink so long as there is Bangladesh or the Gulag? And so on.

Certainly, "Oh What a Paradise It Seems" is minor art, although many of us will never grow up to achieve it. If Lemuel Sears is more plausible than Ezekiel Farragut, he is less compelling than Asa Bascomb in "The World of Apples." He is not, however, a lemon. He doesn't feel that hearing a Brandenburg Concerto in a shopping mall is ridiculous. He is one of the many Cheevers who refuse to give up on "Valor! Love! Virtue! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!" These Cheevers sometimes try too hard, I agree, and the afflatus can be embarrassing, but shouldn't we, like Moses in "The Death of Justina," admire decency and despise death?

In Cheever's stories, men drown and fall off mountains, 15-year-old boys commit suicide, a wife shoots her husband as he is about to hurdle the living-room couch…. [There] is lighter fluid instead of vinegar in the green salad. In the swimming pool, an undertow; in the liquor closet, skeletons; in the snow, wolves. Why? (p. 25)

Everything is fragile. Chance abides and buffets.

It seems to me that Cheever speaks not so much of failures of luck and charm and nerve as of failures of faith. How to be brave and good? He mobilizes language in the service of decencies and intuitions that are no longer sanctioned at any altar or practiced in any politics. His stories are brilliant prayers on behalf of "the perfumes of life…."

Of course, he wants too much. He wants wisdom and beauty, God and sex. Don't we all? Didn't Chekhov? (p. 26)