It had been over a decade since I’d last read Cheever, and my exposure to him before now was exclusively through his novels. I recalled enjoying them, but my memory was vague. Mostly I recalled images of upper crust New England, antiquated blue bloods who drifted into upper midle class suburbia in the first half of the 20th century. I expected much the same from his short stories, and thought this an interesting counterpoint to the last book I read, which collected the stories of Flannery O’Connor, another American writer with a gift for capturing the soul of her region of that vast and multicameral country.
My first impression wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. The first half of The Stories of John Cheever is set principally in New England, and concerns either members of old stock New England families, with their beach houses and servant staff, or their modern suburban equivalents. However, the bulk of the stories in the second half take place in Rome, and focus more on America as an identity than a place.
This surprised me, but what surprised me more than the shift in location was his occasional dip into other literary conventions beyond what I would call—for lack of a better term and due to a dislike of the term “literary fiction”—modern realism, the sort of stories in which the author plumbs the depths of their characters’ minds as they go about their largely plotless lives, culminating in some sort of epiphany. There are stories like The Enormous Radio, which one could argue is science fiction, but is more a satire than anything; dark hints of fantasy in such stories as Torch Song and The Music Teacher, which throw an ominous, otherworldly cast on certain characters without directly commiting to supernatural occurrences; and bouts of absurdism, best highlighted by the Death of Justina—my favorite story in the collection, in which the dispirited narrator waxes in pompous prose about his unfulfilling job, and is forced to carry his wife’s cousin’s body to a neighboring street in order for the coroner to accept her, as the narrator’s house is not zoned for death and dying is strictly forbidden.
Cheever varies his style to match the tone of his story, adopting different narrative voices in first and third person, but there remains a distinct “Cheeverness” throughout, an erudition and fondness for building sentences or metaphors like great Jenga Towers, their tottering precarity underscoring the deftness with which they were constructed. Reading the collection has inspired me to revisit the novels I haven’t read in some time.
