Word: cheever
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...BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW by John Cheever. 275 pages. Harper...
Real Edges. The story is typical of one preoccupation of John Cheever (TIME cover, March 27): the prosperous suburbanite who turns an unsuspected corner and falls off the edge of things into outer darkness. In synopsis, the occult shading of these stories can seem affected, but Cheever is persuasive. His edges are real, and the corners that one turns to reach them seem very near...
Kafka evokes the terror of a citizen forced by a faceless and brutalizing state to stand trial for an unspecified crime. Cheever writes of a subtler terror: that of citizens richly and pointlessly rewarded by an equally faceless society. Unsupported by arrogance of family or formal rank, equipped with no irreplaceable skill, the well-to-do suburbanite wonders vaguely and passionately why he deserves the country clubs, the trips to Bermuda and the swimming pools. More sharply, he wonders how long it will last. Will the money stop? Will the unpredictable demons of alimony or Internal Revenue turn treacherous...
...Classic Lines. The gods were more elaborately and 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...
...Wapshot Scandal, Cheever...