[The size of The Stories of John Cheever]—sixty-one stories, seven hundred pages—necessarily obscures the excellences of individual pieces, as their edges run together; Cheever's obsessively adulterous suburbanites and alcoholic expatriates eventually parody one another, and the complexities of their descriptions are levelled by repetition. On the other hand—and this is true of any writer's collected works—as our attention strays from the plots and characters, it fa...

[The tales collected in The Stories of John Cheever are] awash in the rain of disenchantment and regret, rank with the smell of decay. Though Cheever tried, in his two Wapshot novels, to broaden his scope by endowing the poignancy of nostalgia with a local habitation and name—to portray a vanished New England blessed with social coherence, domestic stability, and moral grace—the quality of his yearning comes through with much greater power in his short stories. His temperament and talent are n...

There are occasional touches of self-importance in [The Stories of John Cheever], but the author has always been very much on his guard against their recurrence and so—being tremendously gifted—he has reaped the true, substantial rewards of lightness. Not disabled by high-mindedness about content or form, his stories have made a brilliant and serious contribution to the genre…. The particular brand of self-importance Cheever had to resist in the early stories was moralistic. Crudely spe...