John Cheever fiction published in The New Yorker

26 Comments

1. October 8th, 2013 / 2:16 pm Kyle Minor—

   He was working his ass off for ten years before he started to hit his stride, and then the really interesting stuff, where he starts experimenting wildly with form, doesn’t hit for another fifteen years in. In between, he does things with stories, structurally, and in terms of beginnings and endings, and in terms of the use of the first-person narrator, that nobody’s ever done before. Reading this list, after a few years of reading Cheever, I see a writer seeking — and finding — paths to freedom and singularity, learning to chase his own weird wants and succeeding utterly, especially in his failures.

   Many readers are turned off by his WASP-y, suburban narrators, or by the slick surfaces and the fantasies they sometimes indulge, but Cheever was always playing double-agent on all that stuff, and what’s underneath it is often as dark as things get.

   I don’t know the purpose of the post. Probably it’s meant ironically, or the joke’s on whomever responds in whatever way. Or maybe not. But who cares? There’s a lot to knock a reader out in Cheever, even though for some readers (I was one), it takes a little while to fall into it. (That was my fault, not Cheever’s.)

   After you do, there’s a catalog of the world in here, overlaid on a catalog of carefully concealed experiment with form and speaker, sometimes submerged beneath a weird surrealism that nobody’s ever been able to completely explain.

2. October 8th, 2013 / 2:44 pm reynard seifert—

   i like the one where the guy finds himself in an absurd situation

3. October 8th, 2013 / 7:08 pm Brooks Sterritt—

   You’ve read more Cheever than I have, and you’ve read him way more generously. I enjoyed reading your analysis/paean.

   About the “purpose” of the post–it’s funny how you imply you don’t know and you don’t care, while simultaneously trying to insert some sort of ironic motive and actually, well, caring. I really hope you’re not trying to go the route of “irony and its woes in the contemporary age.” Things can be ironic and unironic at the same time. A list can suggest to some people that Cheever and the New Yorker are stale, dry, and leathery, and to others it can suggest a towering achievement. I like this list, and the fact that it is presented sans context/explanation.

4. October 8th, 2013 / 8:08 pm Richard Grayson—

   I loved Cheever when I discovered him as teenager in the 60s. I was thinking the other day, after reading a NYTBR piece that referenced it, I’d like to reread “Bullet Park,” my favorite Cheever novel. I met him once, at a 1978 National Arts Club dinner honoring Saul Bellow with their gold medal in literature, when he and Bernard Malamud were chosen to stand up and praise Bellow. He seemed kind of weary of life to me, but then I was just a kid and prone to misunderstand the looks of older people. I still like teaching “The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio,” and a couple of the other stories David has listed.

5. October 8th, 2013 / 8:17 pm Kyle Minor—

   I do care about Cheever, enough to have responded. I don’t know what kind of generalities anyone could offer about the contemporary age. The contemporary age seems to be full of all kinds of competing and contradictory things, like you said.

6. October 8th, 2013 / 8:31 pm Brooks Sterritt—

   It felt like you were defending Cheever (preemptively or something) and attacking irony, which is so fun to attack these days.

7. October 8th, 2013 / 8:41 pm bartleby_taco—

   should i read john cheever

   i feel like ‘john cheever’ is a name that was filed in my brain as ‘author you don’t care about’ several years ago without explanation

   i don’t know anything about john cheever

   i remember his name being used in a seinfeld joke once, i think, about george’s wife’s dad having a closeted homosexual affair with a writer (not even sure it was cheever)

   when i think “john cheever” i think, like, “dusty recliner in an old person’s house,” or like, “brazil nuts”

   have i been unfair to him

8. October 8th, 2013 / 11:00 pm deadgod—

   Kyle’s comment feels to me like he’s happy to take advantage of this opportunity to celebrate Cheever’s achievements–‘defend’? there’s no defensiveness in Kyle’s suit–.

   He’s surely not attacking irony per se or altogether, but rather, provisionally disdaining the particular irony of casting this victory mantle over this broad sneer (provided that that’s what David is doing or readers are reading). –that is, not that it’s always regrettable to pose an incongruity between semantic content and meaning-in-context, but rather, that it’s foolish to mock a fine artist uncomprehendingly. In my view, “stale, dry, and leathery” won’t be made to stick to Cheever. (My guess from a distance: Kyle’s a fan of irony.)

   Kyle does take this Rorschlock list in stride with “the joke’s on whomever responds in whatever way”. It’s a clever, funny ambiguity that David’s made.

9. October 8th, 2013 / 11:18 pm deadgod—

   Of these stories, the two that I love the most are The Chaste Clarissa and The Golden Age. They’re each ugly and self-lacerating, but written in smoothly jeweled sentences, so that as you read them, you might laugh, complicit (perhaps without malice) in their contempt. Their scorn isn’t all of the world, or even all of ‘the city and the suburbs’. But having had something made present as well as Cheever has done is a treat, at least.

10. October 9th, 2013 / 12:13 am John Minichillo—

    Cheever, after being expelled from high school, wrote a story about it that was published in the The New Republic, and the editor there helped him get a spot at Yaddo. He moved to NY at 18 to go be a writer. He was the first offered a first-look contract from the NYer. His collection of stories won a Pullitzer when that never happened. After living his life as a womanizer, notorious alcoholic and pill popper, he got sober, taught writing at Sing Sing, wrote his best book yet, and then he died. Respect that shit, hipsters.

11. October 9th, 2013 / 10:07 am Mark Cugini—

    yes.

12. October 9th, 2013 / 10:14 am mimi—

    feel like an UnderA’Cheever

13. October 9th, 2013 / 1:38 pm deadgod—

    Here’s a different version of Cheever’s “early life”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cheever#Early_life_and_education .

    Here’s a moving reminiscence of Cheever “at Sing Sing” (with a couple of good comments): http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/john-cheever-at-sing-sing-prison.html .

    The earliest short-story collection to win the Pulitzer fiction prize that I could find is Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (’48). (McPherson’s Elbow Room won the year before Cheever’s Stories.) Of the same kind of collections as Cheever’s, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (’66) and The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (’70) won before his did.

    Hipsters might ignore the unhappy life and glad late clarity and respect Cheever’s great writing.

14. October 9th, 2013 / 1:42 pm Brooks Sterritt—

    i don’t know the purpose of your comment, but i’m sure you’re being ironic.

15. October 9th, 2013 / 1:48 pm Brooks Sterritt—

    cheever was a hipster–he used a typewriter

16. October 9th, 2013 / 2:23 pm reynard seifert—

    you’ve put me in an absurd but realistic situation, brooks, how cheever of you

17. October 9th, 2013 / 8:26 pm bartleby_taco—

    ok. what are 3-8 cheever stories i should read?

18. October 9th, 2013 / 9:06 pm mimi—

    The Swimmer

19. October 10th, 2013 / 4:32 am Kyle Minor—

    Goodbye, My Brother
    The Swimmer
    The Five Forty-Eight
    A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear
    The Lowboy
    The Country Husband

    It’s also worth skimming the beginning and ending sentences of all the stories in the red book.

    The next thing to read is Cheever’s Journals, then Falconer.

20. October 10th, 2013 / 10:49 am bartleby_taco—

    Thank you, Kyle!

21. October 10th, 2013 / 10:49 am A D Jameson—

    File under “A Cheever.”

22. October 10th, 2013 / 10:52 am A D Jameson—

    Bullet Park is one of my favorite novels ever, and one of the stranger novels of the late 60s, I’d argue.

23. October 10th, 2013 / 11:23 am deadgod—

    On the subject of short stories and the lamentable lack of respect for short-story ambitions and achievements: http://soundcloud.com/cbc-radio-one/alice-munro-on-world-report (and check the VIDA numbers).

    Bonus: the gold standard for What To Do When Told Complicated News By An Idjit With A Tv Camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBODHFBZ8k .

24. October 10th, 2013 / 1:03 pm ZZZZZIPPP—

    GET THE COLLECTED AND START AT THE END

25. October 11th, 2013 / 6:46 am Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Morning Bites: Elmore Leonard’s Birthday, Tama Janowitz Interviewed, John Cheever’s New Yorker Fiction, Gladwell Responds, and More—

    […] In case you were ever curious about about all the fiction John Cheever ever contributed to the New Yorker… […]

26. October 11th, 2013 / 11:16 am mimi—

    that lessing vid just made my morning cup o’ joe, deaders, thanks

    we’ve also learned that our neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor won in medicine/physiology

    http://elcerrito.patch.com/groups/local-connections/p/uc-professor-randy-schekman-wins-nobel-elcerrito

    folks here are celebrating/giving props by donning [fake] ‘ironic’ ginger ‘staches (really!)

    do you want to know what a Nobel Prize win in Berkeley really means? it means a lifetime free parking space on campus labeled ‘NP’ – most of which stand empty all day, as the NP’ers are all walking/riding their bikes/taking the shuttle to work, causing mild annoyance amongst parking space coveters