Word: cheevers
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...cream of Gardner's choices are stories that bridge these wild swings of mood and tone. Raymond Carver, the John Cheever of machinists and misfits, contributes a characteristically unusual short fiction. By the end of "Cathedral," the sarcastic hero, his eyes shut, is sharing a ballpoint pen with a blind visitor. Together they are drawing a cathedral. "My eyes were still closed. I was in my house and I knew that. But I didn't feel inside anything," he reports. He says to the blind man, "It's really something." Readers of Best American Short Stories will...
...John Cheever, Falconer
What accounts for the show's resurgent popularity? The Cleaver household is quintessentially suburban, the prime-time equivalent of John Cheever's sunlit lawns and the immediate ancestor of Steven Spielberg's split-levels. June forever emerges from the kitchen flawlessly coiffed and groomed, carrying a tray of freshly baked cookies. Ward, like all TV dads, disappears between 9 and 5 to a nameless job, but his real occupation is mowing the lawn and having heart-to-hearts with the boys. Wally, earnest and rather thick, is a slightly more amiable and less somnambulant Rick Nelson...
...John Cheever died last month. A loss to American writing, but not really a disaster. The parlor game of ranking is seductive. We like to wonder if the Darwinian selections of Posterity will confirm our prejudices. The briefly Celebrated poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, with a weather eye on his own coming obscurity: "No reputation is more than snowfall. It vanishes...
That redolence pervades Cheever's writing, along with the poignant recognition that all the senses are doomed to transience. He won fame as a chronicler of mid-century manners, but his deeper subject was always the matter of life and death. - By Paul Gray