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.

In the following essay Gilmore describes John Cheever's portrayal of alcoholism in his short fiction, both for comic effect and as a social critique of the upper-middle class.

In the following essay, Kendle maintains that Cheever's stories are unified by a “passionate attempt to retain and foster an image” of an Eden-like past manifested in places, patterns of behavior, or inner innocence.

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.

In the following essay, Dressner presents a deconstructive reading of “The Country Husband” concentrating on the comic structure, the contrast between the domestic and the wild, and the female versus the male role.

In the following excerpt, Fogelman examines the motifs of immersion in water, the breaking of a storm, and the journey through darkness into light in “Summer Theatre,” “The Swimmer,” and “The World of Apples.”

In the following essay, Hipkiss examines the number of ways in which “The Country Husband” exposes upper middle-class angst and argues that the story is Cheever's most intense and best work of art.

In the following essay, Kozikowski argues that “The Swimmer” is a spiritual allegory owing much to Dante's Inferno in its subject and structure.

In the following essay, Moore argues that although Cheever's characters sometimes act in ways that seem futile and absurd, the fact that they create their own “legends” in a world that seems pointless makes them heroes.

In the following essay, Blythe and Sweet explore Cheever's use of Grail mythology in the characters, events, and settings of “The Swimmer,” and contrast Neddy Merrill, the selfish hero, with the traditional selfless Grail hero.

In the following essay, Hunt argues that Cheever's stories provide more than social commentary; they are lyrical and funny without being merely satiric.

In the following essay, originally published in the New Republic in 1982, Wain applauds Cheever's The World of Apples for being witty and intelligent while depicting characters that behave decently as people “generally do in real life.”

The stories in [The Way Some People Live (1943)] sound the knowing, wry, ironic note of The New Yorker in the late thirties, and in both tone and content they suggest John O'Hara. But the most successful stories—like "Survivor," "In the Eyes of God," or "Forever Hold Your Peace"—have moral implications beyond the range of the bitter anecdote. In The Enormous Radio (1953), the assured elegance of Cheever's style is matched by a heightened ...

Though Cheever disclaims a documentary purpose and (rightly) resents comparison to a social nit-picker like the later John O'Hara, his stories do have a powerful documentary interest—and why not? Documentation of the way we—or some of us—live now has been historically one of those enriching impurities of fiction that only a mad theorist would wish to filter out. Less grand than Auchincloss, subtler and cleverer than Marquand, infinitely more generous than O'Hara, Cheever h...

In the following essay, originally published in Commonweal in 1964, Segal traces the themes of the progression of magic and the transitory nature of material possessions in Cheever's collection of stories, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow.

The fictional landscape of Cheever's art includes the social pretensions and moral implications of modern suburbia, the larger patterns of human experience, such as the loss of innocence and the deep spiritual hunger for a golden simpler past, and the discovery of beautiful moments to celebrate within the contemporary wasteland. These themes and ideas occur again and again in the short stories and novels. The way they are organized and detailed reveals the form in which Cheever's fictional lan...

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 ...

["Oh What a Paradise It Seems"] is too darting, too gaudy in its deployment of artifice and aside, too disarmingly personal in its voice, to be saddled with the label of novel or novella; it is a parable and a tall tale—both sub-genres squarely within the Judeo-Christian tradition, North American branch. Cheever has lately taken the mantle of that tradition ever more comfortably upon his shoulders, and now unabashedly assumes the accents of a seer…. Ever more boldly the celebrant...

Of all our major American writers, John Cheever seems to me the most spontaneous. Because that word has been so much abused I'll say that I take it to refer to a talent that appears to be involuntary, that enables Mr. Cheever to see poetic connections where the rest of us would not have, that causes his mind to teem with radical but always concrete images, that keeps his language in a state of excitement. While Saul Bellow uses a wider frame of reference and John Updike has a firmer control of his ef...

For three decades the legato Cheever prose has remained as urbane and tempting as an ad in the New Yorker, sharing with the magazine that has published nearly all his stories a zealous attention to surfaces, a scrupulous rendition of speech and, not the least of its attractions, a supercilious tone that separates its uncommon reader from the gaucheness and banality of common experience. Cheever has been called the American Chekhov, and it is true that both writers have a ruminative manner, dwell wistfully o...

John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio" derives much of its power from an ironic reinterpretation of the Eden story that helps to universalize what might otherwise appear to be merely a brilliant study of mid-century urban discontent. The chief characters, Jim and Irene Westcott, are appropriately typical representatives of their class and "seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the reports in college alumni bulletins.�...

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.

[Oh What a Paradise It Seems] is what Henry James delighted to call … a nouvelle; and it would almost seem that the old master had Mr. Cheever in his mind's eye when he wrote of "the only compactness that has a charm, the only spareness that has a force, the only simplicity that has a grace—those, in each order, that produce the rich effect." Though the canvas is small in this new novel, it is not miniature work; it is broad, impressionistic, at its best a poetic narrative...

In Cheever's imagination the concrete, visual world is transformed into emotion, and emotion into something akin to nostalgia. The senses, alerted to a patch of blue sky or swirling leaves or a sudden shaft of sunlight, are stimulated to a recollection that transcends the present and transcends, when Cheever's writing is at its most powerful, the very instrument of perception that is its vehicle. Hence the peculiar airiness of Falconer, the translucent quality of its protagonist Ezekiel Farrag...

In Oh What a Paradise It Seems, [Cheever's] dualistic world of facts and truths, matter and spirit, is suddenly more starkly lit than ever before—the search for spiritual salvation more insistent, material corruption more pervasive. The renowned pungency, diversity, and color of Cheever's writing seem to have faded somewhat; and the nostalgia, ever-present in his narratives about his wandering race, has lost some of its humane, lyric tone and echoes more remotely now. The narrator of th...

John Cheever has been publishing his short stories for over 30 years now, and he has gradually spread before us a landscape so solid and believable that the average American reader could almost draw a map of Shady Hill, Bullet Park, or St. Botolphs. We know intimately the Cheever hero—an unassuming man whose innocence and optimism often give him the appearance of someone much younger. And we know the basis of most Cheever plots: a subtle tension between what Cheever calls the "facts" (t...

Few swan-songs from any important writer of fiction can have been as well-tuned as [Oh What a Paradise It Seems]. In these 100 pages, John Cheever … with perfectly pleasurable art provides us with an epitaph to his working life, and the theme that stoked it for 40 years. He once described it as 'the terrible beauty of the world, and the pain of those who reach after it as it disappears'…. The polluting spread of urban greed, and of arid metropolitan attitudes to love and the mode...

[John Cheever] like Borges is fond of giving his characters lots of room to meditate, generalize, philosophize, and turn their stories into illustrated essays…. [His] work has begun to resemble that of Borges in another way too. The post-World-War-II upperclass world of which he writes, the well-educated gin-drinking manners—conscious gentry on the decline … all this has become faded, unreal, and as literary as the settings and characters of Borges' stories. The effect is valuabl...

[Cheever's] sympathy for people is consistently strong. [He] shows a steady affection for even the nastiest of his characters—even at their most degraded moments. In the darkest of his stories [collected in The Stories of John Cheever] there shines a light; that light is Cheever's loyalty to human beings—in spite of ourselves…. What makes the affirmation of humanity in Cheever's work so successful is that he never chooses easy subjects for love…. Cheever writ...

Oh What a Paradise It Seems is very much about marvelling at the environment and at our irreversible pollution of it. There is, as with Barth, some structural chicanery, but Cheever is infinitely more subtle. His disarming narrator tells us, 'This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night'. He describes the battle waged by elderly Lemuel Sears to transform the poisoned lake in his home town into the pure, perfect pond of nostalgic memory…. The rug of the plot, howeve...

Some words by their very nature define not our world but an ideal one, one in which we can believe but not live. It was always John Cheever's achievement to see that the middle class pretends that these words define reality, and then acts according to that faith, so that keeping up appearances is not only a desperate task but a noble stance…. In an imagined world where moral truths fly in the face of facts, Cheever's stories [collected in The Stories of John Cheever] set up extreme tens...