Word: cheevers
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...enjoy its rewards, is defeated by the metamorphosis of his wife Melissa. Once the personification of love, she is transformed into a spirit of hostile chastity, and then into a voracious nymphomaniac, with Circe's vile power of turning men into beasts. Intended as a design in "improbability," Cheever's Scandal is saying that the bizarre, inexplicable and mythical event is closer to the truth of 1964 than any realistic report...
Missionary on the Terrace. In both his novels and stories, Cheever has taken, more or less intact from the past, the ancient American moral severities and told a hundred parables to show that the emancipated middle class about which he now writes must pay homage to his tribal gods of purity and order. He has added (his ancestors might have thought it a subtraction) a lyrical delight in natural creation. The American wilderness is a sacred grove (not an inimical principle, as it was to Hemingway). Cheever's world is one of delight for those who obey the gods...
...native costume (Ivy League in this case). Cheever has infiltrated the permissive, prosperous characters who people High Suburbia and is apt to show up on the cocktail terrace or dining room to disconcert his agnostic friends with a pulpit message and scandalize the merely pious by preaching it on a text from Ovid involving the couplings of goddesses and beasts...
...Maupassant's fiction has been likened to that of "a peasant eating the good side of a wormy apple." It is Cheever's peculiar distinction to make his readers relish the Winesap flesh at the same time as he etymologizes on the worm: the importance of his fiction comes from the urgency of his moral insights. This puts his work in a different order of art from that of John O'Hara, a man of greater technical skill with a harder eye for the surface detail of current U.S. life, but one who is limited...
Flawed Memories. The first Cheever in America was a Puritan schoolmaster who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for "his untiring abjuration of the devil" and who believed that "man is full of misery and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt." Cheever's mother and her parents emigrated from England, and, he says, "there was a certain air of shabby gentility about the whole thing. I hate to speak about the twilight of Athenian Boston and all that, but Cousin Randall would play two Beethoven sonatas after dinner, and everyone would sit around and belch...