Few American writers have been so clear in mapping their recurrent subject matter and themes as John Cheever. From his first published story, "Expelled," he has been concerned with the Fall from a condition of Edenic childlike innocence into the painful chaos of adult knowledge. Most of his novels and stories share the theme of the Fall or are variations on the same theme. This recurring concern is so ingrained in Cheever's work that he can be considered a mythopoeic writer, as was William Faulkner, that is, a writer who managed to create a mythic world of his own. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is instantaneously recognizable, and so, too, is Cheever's early mythopoeic world of St. Botolphs and its later Westchester equivalents of Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park. Though Cheever told Scott Donaldson in a 1982 interview that fiction was "never crypto-autobiography," a reader even slightly familiar with his work notices clear correspondences that form themselves into unmistakable patterns.
