Word: cheevers
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...Housebreaker of Shady Hill, by John Cheever. A master of the short story looks through the cracked picture windows at the anxieties of upper suburbia...
...HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL (185 pp.)-John Cheever-Harper...
...people of John Cheever's stories dwell among the shifting symbols of success, where the status is very seldom quo. Most of them live in Manhattan or commute to its skyscraper hives, for that is where the honey is. But somehow their lives, loves and labors leave the cuprous taste of pennies in their mouths; the middle-income bracket is their social vise. Few writers have probed the masked anxieties of the "have-not-enoughs" with the skill and authority of John (The Wapshot Chronicle) Cheever, 46. After Marquand, he is the ablest chronicler of the interior life...
Cards of Identity. Author Cheever's plots carry his punch in the way that cotton carries chloroform. His stories are saturated with the sights and sounds of suburban life. His characters show the identity cards of the hard-pressed middle class: unpaid bills, buttonless shirts, little scraps of paper that read, "oleomargarine, frozen spinach, Kleenex, dog biscuit . . ." They believe they are "outside the realm of God's infinite mercy," and yet their prayer is heartfelt: "Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapes and Bloody Marys...
...moments, and moments only, Cheever's characters can be possessed by joy, reveling in the "idle splash and smell of a heavy rain" or scenting on some passing breeze "the salt air in the churches of Venice." But guilt and remorse close in like sudden fog, a free-floating guilt that seems to swirl around some atavistic memory of the Good Life. Thus an errant wife who has drunk and danced through the night is startled by the birds of dawning: "The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal-some simple way of life...