Word: cheevers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only the walking seems old-fashioned enough to be eccentric. Almost any Sunday, Cheever's small figure may be seen tramping on the back roads around Croton Dam trailed by his two Labradors. His lined, nut-brown face, like that of so many Americans of the middle class, is that of an aging schoolboy, and his clothes that schoolboy uniform-tweed jacket, khaki drill pants and scuffed loafers...
...netherworld of damnation. In Metamorphoses, one neighbor has suffered a magical transformation into Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds. In another story, his wife has become the enchantress who converted her daughter into a swimming pool. Even the A. & P. supermarket has been peopled by Cheever with a crowd "moaning and crying" as they are "reviled and taken away" to some enigmatic doom...
...Cheever's demonic quality is just beginning to emerge in his fiction from its buttoned-up Brooks Brothers carapace of realism. It has always been recognized in the private pre-Ovidian Cheever. "He is a magician," says his friend Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, recalling the old women who lurked in the back parlors of the Negro section of Oklahoma City where he grew up. "He can take a watch chain or something and tell you the whole man." Even Mary Cheever subscribes to the theory that her husband is not as other men. She recounts with some...
Story Machine. Cheever is not a writer with a public personality to flourish and exploit, such as Hemingway or Norman Mailer. He has appeared...
...essential point about this complex man is made by his veteran editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell. Quoting Gertrude Stein on the absoluteness of creation, Maxwell once said: "If 'a rose is a rose is a rose,' a rose is also a rose-making machine. Cheever is a storymaking machine." To untangle the somewhat lush botanical metaphor, this means not merely that Cheever is a natural writer, who thinks best about events in the pattern of a fable, but that he himself has become his own best-realized character...