[In the following essay, originally published in the New York Herald in 1943, Feld asserts that, although most of the stories in The Way Some People Liveare mere moments or fragments of stories, Cheever succeeds in portraying his characters with sympathy and irony.]

To the extent that in the writing world any material—sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction—is called a story, John Cheever's book, “The Way Some People Live,” may be called a collection of stories. But in the conventional sense, only a few of the thirty pieces that make up the volume fulfill the ordinary requirements of the short-fiction form. The rest are moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality but inconclusive in effect. They give the feeling, very often, of being notes made on a contemplated larger work which has remained unfinished. While they are interesting as fragments and show a subtle and sensitive talent at irony and satire, they leave the reader suspended in anticipation that has no artistic fulfillment.

That Mr. Cheever can bring a story to a satisfying conclusion, however unconventional his pattern, is evidenced by some of the pieces in the book. His story called “The Cat” succeeds notably in presenting a crisis in the lives of a young married couple. When Hannah Bannister thought her pet was lost she became a woman demented, deprived of everything that meant a home to her. To comfort her, her husband threw over all his objections against their having a child, promising her to save his money, to stay on the wagon to buy a house in Westchester. Mr. Cheever's penetration into the emotional conflict, past as well as present, gives the story its distinction.

He accomplishes the same thing in “The Edge of the World,” this time in describing the desperation and loneliness of a boy. The lad is an only child, aware of the fact that neither of his parents ever wanted him. They wound and lacerate him with their quarrels and mutual accusations of infidelity. What brings them to a feverish reconciliation is not the anguish of their child but an insignificant accident to the woman.

The search for a husband makes the theme of “Summer Remembered.” “I'm twenty-five years old,” declares Grace to her friend Betty who had boasted of having an admirer at Lake George the summer before, “and I'm not getting any younger and I have two weeks off to find a man and all I find is a lot of old women looking at the mountains.” The pay-off in this piece is Betty's confession that all she has said about her man was a parcel of lies.

“The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York” is a penetrating story of a soldier, a former lawyer, who hated the life of the army, who had a chance to get a medical discharge and return to the city he loved and discovered that he didn't want to.

In “A Border Incident” Mr. Cheever most closely approaches the conventional story with a surprise ending but unlike his other pieces it lacks his integrity of characterization. The prude who gave herself, as the saying goes, to a man in order to discover his activities as a Nazi spy, makes neither sense nor satire.

But, mainly, however slight his material, Mr. Cheever brings sympathy and irony to characters in the bleak moments in which he catches them. He explores various kinds of relationships, that between husbands and wives, between brothers, between parents and children, between lovers, between friends. It would be interesting to see what he could do with a task that required a more sustained effort than the contributions in the present book.