[The tales collected in The Stories of John Cheever are] awash in the rain of disenchantment and regret, rank with the smell of decay. Though Cheever tried, in his two Wapshot novels, to broaden his scope by endowing the poignancy of nostalgia with a local habitation and name—to portray a vanished New England blessed with social coherence, domestic stability, and moral grace—the quality of his yearning comes through with much greater power in his short stories. His temperament and talent are not at ease with the patient exploration of motives and extended personal histories, but they are flawlessly suited to the sentient moment, the rigorously foreshortened episode and isolated visual detail that suggest an unspoken fullness of feeling, a tacit sense of destiny, with highly concentrated intensity.

Peculiarly at home within the immediate present, Cheever is a master of the perfectly observed, evocative, unforgettably fixed moment...