Oh What a Paradise It Seems is very much about marvelling at the environment and at our irreversible pollution of it. There is, as with Barth, some structural chicanery, but Cheever is infinitely more subtle. His disarming narrator tells us, 'This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night'. He describes the battle waged by elderly Lemuel Sears to transform the poisoned lake in his home town into the pure, perfect pond of nostalgic memory….

The rug of the plot, however, is gradually and brilliantly pulled from under our feet. For who is the narrator? The seemingly sympathetic voice who guides us through our little idiocies is apparently speaking with casual, intelligent hindsight from some point in the future never exactly defined. He seems to think of our era in the same sentimental manner as his characters. Surely, he has...