John Cheever Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rose Feld

Critical Essay by Rose Feld

SOURCE: “New Fiction from Atlantic to Pacific,” in The Critical Response to John Cheever, edited by Francis J. Bosha, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 5-6.

In the following essay, originally published in the New York Herald in 1943, Feld asserts that, although most of the stories in The Way Some People Live are mere moments or fragments of stories, Cheever succeeds in portraying his characters with sympathy and irony.

To the extent that in the writing world any material—sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction—is called a story, John Cheever's book, “The Way Some People Live,” may be called a collection of stories. But in the conventional sense, only a few of the thirty pieces that make up the volume fulfill the ordinary requirements of the short-fiction form. The rest are moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality but inconclusive in effect. They give the feeling, very...
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