The publication of Falconer, with its shockingly new milieu and its unusually violent language, is only the most dramatic proof that Cheever is not afraid to push off from past accomplishments and to work with previously untried materials. But his whole body of work reveals that he has consistently been willing to grow, to extend the range of his subject matter, and increasingly to complicate his recurring themes. One of his early reviewers worried that the main danger for Cheever might be to find himself trapped within the elegant style of his promising early stories, but Cheever has enlarged and refined that style through four novels and several hundred short stories. No two collections of short stories are the same; some obvious development of theme, tone, or style marks each. Even The Wapshot Scandal, a sequel, goes far beyond the setting and the perspective of The Wapshot Chronicle. Bullet Park was different enough from Cheever's previous work so as to be radically misunderstood when it was published, and Falconer was an even more startling departure from Cheever's earlier subject matter and style.
At the same time, Cheever does have certain recurrent themes which give a sense of coherence to his career, much as the international theme and the conflict between innocence and experience unify the works of Henry James. One of Cheever's most frequently chosen subjects is family relationships, but he is no simple chronicler or analyst. He has too much respect for the mysterious spaces as well as the successful synapses between husbands and wives, parents and children. He also writes of the relationship between brothers, showing it as intimate and loyal in The Wapshot Chronicle, as fratricidal in Falconer, with many gradations in between in other works. Along with this focus on the family, Cheever incorporates the historical and cultural developments of his times into his fiction. The Depression and World War II figure to some degree in his earliest stories; bomb shelters, the space program, and the sexual revolution appear in his later works. The ground where these dual interests in the internal dynamics of the person and the external convulsions of the world meet is in Cheever's attention to the dailiness of American life, the focus that often gets him characterized as a novelist of manners. Generally, however, in the novel form, he deals with the more extreme experiences of human life; it is more often his stories that really work out the relationships between the inner person and outer world, the present and the past, the best that we dream of being and compromises we continually make.
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