Word: cheevers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW, by John Cheever. In these chilling short stories, the fall from corporate grace, the merger, the personal scandal that might stop the money, are the demons Cheever uses to speculate about the fears of salaried suburbanites...
...BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW, by John Cheever. In these chilling short stories, the fall from corporate grace, the merger, the personal scandal that might stop the money are the demons Cheever uses to speculate about the fears of salaried suburbanites...
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...
...mode is much more successful in the last, and best, story in the Metamorphoses series, when Cheever keeps only the mood of magical transformation. Goaded by the Surgeon General's report, Mr. Bradish gives up tobacco and his sanity. "Late in the party, a young woman wearing a light sack or tube-shaped dress, her long hair the color of Virginia tobacco, came in at the door. In his ardor to reach her, he knocked over a table and several glasses. It was, or had been up to that point, a decorous party, but the noise of broken glass...