The stories in [The Way Some People Live (1943)] sound the knowing, wry, ironic note of The New Yorker in the late thirties, and in both tone and content they suggest John O'Hara. But the most successful stories—like "Survivor," "In the Eyes of God," or "Forever Hold Your Peace"—have moral implications beyond the range of the bitter anecdote. In The Enormous Radio (1953), the assured elegance of Cheever's style is matched by a heightened moral sensibility, and many of the stories, turning away from the frustrations and blind alleys of urban life, celebrate the continuing possibilities of human experience. The volume contains some of Cheever's best, and some of his best known, stories: "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Children," "Torch Song," "The Summer Farmer," and the title story. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958) moves from the city to the Westchester suburbs, but Cheever continues to celebrate life even in this unpromising setting. The title story of Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961) hints at a major change of intention and material: Cheever here turns his back on much of his earlier writing. His new novel, he writes, will be quite different in "pace and color" from The Wapshot Chronicle, and evidences of a change in tone and method can be seen in the stories which have appeared in The New Yorker since 1960.
Cheever's stories have usually been praised for their literary excellence: they have a high polish and reflect an urbane and subtle mind. But they are necessarily discontinuous; the principal source of a short story, according to Cheever, is "the interrupted event." Contemporary life, seen through Cheever's stories, may look like "a chain of brilliant reflections on water, unrelated perhaps to the motion of the water itself, but completely absorbing in their color and shine." But there is much more to Cheever's writing than superficial glitter, and his stories, though highly entertaining, are not mere entertainment.
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