Word: cheevers
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DIED. John Cheever, 70, elegiac storyteller of suburbia; after a long illness; in Ossining, N.Y. (see BOOKS...
...John Cheever...
...these risks: Robert Frost brings 25% less than he did a decade ago, Hemingway is barely holding, and Faulkner is sluggish. On the other hand, Wallace Stevens' rare first volume, Harmonium, $2 when published in 1923, can bring $800. The far more recent works of John Updike, John Cheever and Saul Bellow have done nearly as well. Some sharp collectors bought John Gardner's first novel, The Resurrection (1972), for cut-rate prices on bookshop remainder tables after the author's Grendel gained a national reputation. Current worth for a mint copy...
Paradise may not be a masterpiece. Cheever's characters, after all, are thin, doll-like creations next to those of his colleagues Updike and Bellow. And even though the novella has a broader vision than one might otherwise expect from Cheever, it still lacks the acute moral curiosity one expects from a greater writer. He still yields to the impulse to pattern events, to make a sort of literary bon-bon although this one is finely textured and eminently palatable...
...sentimental to say so, but there is a satisfaction, indeed a reassurance in seeing this achievement when the author is himself pushing 70. Athletes usually hang up their cleats by 35, theoretical scientists rarely stay fecund into their 40s and most writers turn out their best stuff before 50 Cheever's publication of Oh What a Paradise It Seems, and the broadening of vision it demonstrates, is an act with all the beauty of a well-broken rule...