Word: cheevers
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...native ground Peter De Vries, in Forever Panting, is off again, a touch more vulgar than before, word-playing his way through another marital war. This one includes a husband who develops a yen for his surrogate mother-in-law. John Cheever and Bernard Malamud have collections of short stories, both domestic, the one (The World of Apples) waspish and suburban, the other (Rembrandt's Hat) Jewish and urban. Evan S. Connell Jr., once more roving far from the Bridges of Kansas City, has produced Points for a Compass Rose, a poetic meditation upon the pain and perplexity...
SOUTH JERSEY SUBURBS, which I'm familiar with, are different from the ones John Cheever writes about. Where I come from, the landscape is already second-generation neon, and the politics are set by whether the last influx from Philadelphia was middle-or upper-class. There are no pretensions of communality, no historic town squares now hidden: high-rise apartments take their proud and random places next to split-level housing developments and an occasional patch of barren land. Over the last eight years, a "right side of the tracks" has developed, established by the construction of "wooded estates...
Both more and less goes on in the Cheever villages of The World of Apples. His characters are indelibly New Englanders: reserved, though-tridden, hoping to act both well and right. They are much easier to get a handle on than the passionately self-indulgent and upwardly-mobile citizens of my fair suburb. And. in Cheever, there is still an air of sanctity to the towns themselves: his people still cherish the idea of community, even if all the familiar points of reference, the town halls and the churches, are flying off in pinwheel motion. Cheever is still writing about...
...fragment of a story does concentrate on the perils caused by widening a highway by a small town, but the subject there is arbitrariness, not tension; another makes some peripheral play about in-flight motion pictures. But because Cheever and his creations are mainly so tradition-bound, his chronicles of disorder and lack of faith make the needs for faith and order cry out even louder. And Cheever is such a consistently honest and witty writer, carefully building up his characters through dialogue and their own partial vision of the world, and then thrusting them up against unexpected circumstance, that...
...CHEEVER'S STORIES are packed with detail and cross-current. They all end up saying more than a swift reading of the action would deliver. "The Four Alarms"--the first story in the book, and one of the cleverest--tells about a fairly young suburban housewife who tires of teaching and goes into theatrics, and winds up acting in a circa '69 nude play (Ozamanides II). "Oh, I'm so happy," she says when she gets the part. "Oh, how wonderful and rich and strange life can be when you stop playing out the roles that your parents wrote...