SOURCE: “John Cheever: The ‘Swimming’ of America,” in Critical Essays on John Cheever, edited by R. G. Collins, G. K. Hall & Company, 1982, pp. 180-91.

In the following essay, Slabey compares “The Swimmer” with “Rip Van Winkle,” exploring the contrast between the dreams we live by and the reality we live.

… the story of Rip Van Winkle has never been finished, and still awaits a final imaginative recreation.

—Constance Rourke

Indeed, the central fact about America in 1970 is the discrepancy between the realities of our society and our beliefs about them. The gap is even greater in terms of our failure to understand the possibilities and potential of American life.

—Charles A. Reich

I

More than a century after Washington Irving described the Catskills as “fairy mountains” with “magical hues” produced by seasonal and diurnal atmospheric changes, John Cheever has taken that enchanted vicinity as the setting for some...