We have been here before, in Cheever country, and it is fine [in "Oh What a Paradise It Seems"] to return. Ordinary people, who keep seed in the bird-feeding station and who do not see that playing golf and raising flowers are depraved, undergo an inexplicable test of heart. They are attacked in "that sense of sanctuary that is the essence of love." They dared to imagine that pain and suffering were "a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe," and then the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and their children are suddenly refugees, right here on Hitching Post Lane.
There are pluses and minuses when a writer repeats himself. Those of us who were dismayed by the heroin addiction, homosexuality and convenient miracles of "Falconer" will be relieved to see him skating again on familiar ice. When Ezekiel ("God strengthens") went to prison for killing his brother, it was as if Chekov—and Cheever is our Chekov—had ducked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing the cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. Hadn't we had enough of the fire alarms of modernism?
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