Word: actaeon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...profoundly explored in Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle. These stories are in his lesser mode. In fact, the stratagem of treating suburbia as if it were a sacred grove, with every flowering tree an imprisoned nymph, works best when it is worked least. One story, for instance, begins: "Larry Actaeon was built along classical lines . . ." and the reader, with the help of a mythological dictionary, recalls that Actaeon observed Diana at her bath and was punished by being turned into a stag and torn apart by hounds. All too patly, Larry Actaeon sees a lady partner in his investment-banking...
...Proxmire Manor, the suburban region is subjected to terrible metamorphosis. It is not Sing Sing Prison straddling the New York Central tracks by the Hudson shore that is the worst destination of the inhabitants, but a netherworld of damnation. In Metamorphoses, one neighbor has suffered a magical transformation into Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds. In another story, his wife has become the enchantress who converted her daughter into a swimming pool. Even the A. & P. supermarket has been peopled by Cheever with a crowd "moaning and crying" as they are "reviled and taken away" to some enigmatic...