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.

But, lest this should sound portentous and moralising in intent, one must add that Cheever's chief quality in his writing is a distanced irony. He has the sharp eye of a naturalist, and a Jamesian view of manners—the conventional overcoat for surging desires and affections buttoned inside.

This valedictory story has the proportions that he found in his best short stories, but which eluded him in his four longer novels….

[A plot summary of his new book] does distorted justice to Cheever's resonance. First, there is his prose, which is charged like Scott Fitzgerald's, its only flaw a kind of convolution that can jar because the sentences are weighted more than their meaning. Yet it has a sheer pleasure about it that constantly sends one back to reread. It is also aptly digressive, almost Dickensian in its ability to take off into dangerous diversions….

Secondly, the Olympian Cheever doesn't show off his superiority to his characters….

Cheever treats all these people as if he's an observer at a party who doesn't know anyone else there, but is eager to find out. He doesn't invent beyond their capacities, as, say, Nabokov will take off into great flights of fancy, subjecting his creatures to horrors and dilemmas that are exceptional and shocking. Cheever is the chronicler of what Calvin Coolidge called normalcy; it's the ordinary world that his characters can't keep pace with….

His virtues, though they may have been polished to fit the commercial requirements of the magazines which gave him a living, have remained those of a puritanical strain of American writing, going back to Hawthorne and Thoreau.