When I was a boy I read a story that terrified me. It was about a child who declared that he needed the help of no living creature. That night the sheep came and took from him everything woolen, the tree came and took everything wooden, and so on until he was naked and cold under the sky. I remembered this fairy tale while reading The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, a collection of the short stories John Cheever has written over the last ten years. My children's story contains both Cheever's most successful technique and his obsessive theme. The technique is the use of magic progressing logically; the theme is the chanciness of possessions.

If Louis Auchincloss writes the best fiction about the rich these days, Cheever writes the best fiction about people living like the rich. Auchincloss' characters are at home with what they own, and are free to worry about moral questions; Cheever's live in constant terror that the paraphernalia of their lives will suddenly vanish. And they are right. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” and the swimming pool goes down the drain.

Cheever's people tend to live in Connecticut. They are investment bankers, and the acquaintances they don't much like, but keep meeting at cocktail parties, manufacture tongue depressers. They are filled with unearned snobberies which are used as a bulwark against change, because in Cheever's world change is always for the worse. In “The Swimmer,” Donald Westerhazy, at a pool-side party, realizes that he could swim home, by way of all the pools between the party and his house. As he goes from pool to pool his greeting from friends becomes less friendly, until it is downright hostile, and when he reaches his home he finds that no one has lived in it for a long, long time.

There are two notable things about this story, besides the tale itself, that make it memorable. The reader hardly notices that the seasons change from mid-Summer to Winter; the hero's reception from pool to pool charts his decline from bad manners to bad morals. Because of Cheever's technical mastery the ending is both unbelievable and prepared for; the logic within the magic makes it inevitable.

The implication is that Donald Westerhazy loses the world because of some flaw in himself; Larry Acteon (see “Bulfinch”) is destroyed by a series of tiny erosions. His story is in another typical Cheever mode: the comfortable man living the comfortable life, whose comforts are suddenly removed after his sense of reality and sense of self are given a series of small but damaging blows. He is a partner in a conservative investment firm who enters the office of his senior partner without knocking. He finds the man nakedly entertaining a naked lady. Later that day, in a bar, he is barked at by a dog who never barks at strangers; still later he is mistaken for a deliveryman by an elevator operator. When he arrives home that night he is killed by his own dogs, who fail to recognize him.

Since Cheever's characters find their reality in their status and possessions, and since these are tightly held in a slippery grip, his people have a weak hold on their own reality. “I have this terrible feeling that I'm a character in a television situation comedy, I mean I'm nice looking, I'm well dressed, I have humorous and attractive children, but I have this terrible feeling … that I can be turned off by anybody” says a Cheever wife. And then the narrator says about her, “My wife is often sad because her sadness is not a sad sadness, sorry because her sorrow is not a crushing sorrow,” which applies to all of Cheever's characters, and is true and damning about Cheever's work.

I have described these stories by their structure, these characters by their types, because his characters run to types and brilliant structure is his mainstay. Cheever is working with an attitude toward life, acutely observed and full of variation. But his people not only think they can be turned off, they can be. They are not fleshed out, their sadness is not a sad sadness. His stories belong where they are usually found, in a thin column in the New Yorker; they comment on the advertisements on either side for solid gold taxi whistles and for the sports jacket that will really make you feel casual. One finishes a book of them delighted by Cheever's suave style, dazzled by the necromancy of his invention, and aware that he is touching on the horror beneath the surface. But it is horror recollected in detachment.