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...WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS by John Cheever Knopf; 100 pages...
This is Author John Cheever's first new book since the novel Falconer (1977). In the interim came The Stories of John Cheever (1978), an elegant anthology of some of the best American short fiction written this century. It was justifiably praised and prized; it also became a bestseller, which collections of stories are not supposed to do. Having summed up one strand of his career, and facing a considerably enlarged circle of admirers, the author was left with some money, acclaim and a very hard act to follow...
...Cheever, 69, has sensibly not tried to top himself. Oh What a Paradise It Seems stakes out neutral territory. Too long to be a story and too short to be a novel, it seems instead a coda to other works, a spontaneous riff on some people, places and things that have appeared elsewhere in Cheever's fiction. The hero could be (but is not) one of those stubborn old Yankee Wapshots. The settings range from New York City to a declining country village, with the hint of suburban Bullet Parks and Shady Hills sprawling in between. And the plot...
...events occur: a beloved family dog is shot through the heart; Sears' ally in the pollution case is wiped out, gangland style; an infant is accidentally abandoned by the side of a highway; Sears stumbles into a brief and mystifying homosexual tryst. Amid all this activity, Cheever's attention regularly shifts to other matters. A scene in a supermarket veers into a meditation on the historical importance of commerce: "It is because our fortresses were meant to be impregnable that the fortresses of the ancient world have outlasted the marketplaces of the past, leaving the impression that fear...
Like his hero, Cheever wants to believe that life is not being systematically brutalized and defaced, that there is nothing new under the sun that cannot be traced to some ancient, honorable rite. It would, unfortunately, take a much longer book than this to make such a case, much less transcribe it into a persuasive narrative. Readers new to Cheever are likely to find Oh What a Paradise It Seems fragmentary, preachy and thin. But the book is illuminated by its past; it assumes significance from the history of splendid fiction that Cheever has given it and everyone. -By Paul...