Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although Bradbury is an authentic original, he has his antecedents. Promises, Promises, about the price a man must pay for the survival of his injured daughter, is a direct descendant of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. In Trapdoor, when an attic swallows a homeowner, the author is bowing in the direction of John Collier and Roald Dahl, two modern masters of the big chill. Bradbury is quick to acknowledge the sources of inspiration. "The ideas are my own," he says, "but books, movies, memories, provide the launching pads on the voyage to stories...
...that are included simply underscore the absence of so many others. Here is Cheever, taking tranquilizers as a prescribed substitute for alcohol, complaining that the medication made him feel as "stagnant as the water under an old millwheel." On a visit to the University of Utah in 1977, the author grows enamored of a teaching fellow and confides to his journal: "Lonely and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with Max in a motel room of unusual squalor." Near...
This biographer can hardly be blamed for the perverse effects of the Salinger case, i.e., the ability of an author who has not published a word since 1965 to squelch other words well into the litigious future. Nor is it Donaldson's fault that Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark scooped him by revealing her father's bisexuality. These handicaps are difficult but not necessarily ruinous. Unfortunately, John Cheever, which is certain to command wide attention because of its subject's fame, displays a range of self- inflicted weaknesses...
...about such stale expressions. He was, after all, capable of describing himself as "intrinsically disheveled." Worse still, Donaldson seems only dimly aware of the discipline and artistry that went into Cheever's fiction. Two early stories, the biographer writes, "were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about." If "caring about" characters were truly a recipe for literary success, the world would be awash with masterpieces...
...faults, this may be the most detailed biography of Cheever for some years to come. Grudging attention must be paid by all those who value Cheever and his work. But devotees can also look forward to the scheduled publications later this year of the author's collected letters and previously uncollected stories. Cheever's waspish, beguiling voice has clearly not had its last word...