[John Cheever] like Borges is fond of giving his characters lots of room to meditate, generalize, philosophize, and turn their stories into illustrated essays…. [His] work has begun to resemble that of Borges in another way too. The post-World-War-II upperclass world of which he writes, the well-educated gin-drinking manners—conscious gentry on the decline … all this has become faded, unreal, and as literary as the settings and characters of Borges' stories.
The effect is valuable, in allowing us to see deeper into Cheever's subjects. For a single instance: he has often disturbed readers with his insistence on the mutual incompatibility of brothers—which is putting it mildly; they tend to try to kill each other. And sure enough, the very first story in [The Stories of John Cheever] ends with a Cain felling his brother with a piece of driftwood. But the collection and the distancing of reality into fiction show us something else: Cheever's brothers divide life into what it ought to be (defined as rules, as ideals, as art, as rigidity) and what it is (defined as mess, liveliness, sordidness, intensity). In story after story, siding sometimes with one, sometimes with the other, Cheever works out variations on these complements of life as necessary to us as up and down, good and bad, better and worse, life and death.
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