John Cheever Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Scott Donaldson

Critical Essay by Scott Donaldson

SOURCE: “Cheever's Shady Hill: A Suburban Sequence,’” in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 133-50.

In the following essay, Donaldson examines how Cheever exploits the contrast between the turmoil of his characters' inner lives and the seeming tranquility of their outer lives in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories.

Over the course of the previous half century, Vladimir Nabokov observed in November 1971, “the greatest Short Stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in [the United States].” As examples, Nabokov went on to cite half a dozen personal favorites, with John Cheever's “The Country Husband” (1954) leading the list.¹ Two years later, John Leonard declared his belief that “Cheever is our best living writer of short stories,” adding that this view was not commonly shared.²...
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