Word: cheever
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When PBS adapted three John Cheever stories for TV in 1979, Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. (The Dining Room, Scenes from American Life) seemed ideally suited to write one of the scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family...
HOME BEFORE DARK by Susan Cheever. A revealing and poignant memoir of the author John Cheever by his sorrowing and sometimes bitter daughter...
...Susan Cheever is too unblinking, too unabashed as dredging up the most compromising tidbits recorded by her father in his unreleased journals, to ever lose her credibility. Although enormously self-absorbed, the John Cheever we get here made a very positive impact on his daughter: "We had wonderful times. A simpler way to put this is that my father loved his children. The three of us were, as he said, 'the roof and settle' of his existence. As individuals we often displeased him, but as a unit we were cherished and indispensable...
...sweetest surprise of Home Before Dark is how much of John Cheever's magical voice has been inherited in Susan Cheever. At the end of the book, the daughter evokes the her melancholy after John Cheever's death in 1982--the tone is vintage Papa...
Perhaps this passage provides a good analogy for the book as a whole: some of the time Susan Cheever feels like cutting her father's legend down to size, and she's right on target, but she's only pitching snowballs; as the ice melts into water and slides off. John Cheever's name emerges again, still carved firmly into stone, but the outlines are somehow clearer, fresher...