Word: cheevers
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...devoted to writing, but Cheever happily spends afternoons doing an exurban homeowner's chores and errands for his busy wife, who teaches English literature three days a week at nearby Briardiff College. Every Sunday he attends 8 a.m. Communion at All Saints Episcopal Church. He delights in dancing, enjoys his liquor with zest. His courtesy is immaculate, but in speech he is elliptical to the point of exasperation, with a tendency to finish only one in four of his sentences...
Moral Delight. Cheever is not a great expositor of character. Fiction as character study belongs to the Victorian novel, and this, he believes, is as obsolete as the world it moved in-the tight, homogeneous community, before mass communications smoothed out the world and blurred individuality. This tends to make his novels seem disjointed, but he defends it on the ground that disjunction is the nature of modern society...
Morality is his standard, but delight is his theme. And uniquely among latter-day writers, he argues that delight can come through morality, and perhaps only through it. No illicit pleasures commend themselves to Cheever. Says he, quoting Leander's last testament to his sons: "Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." Cheever does not interpret this as restrictive...
Ultimately, Cheever tries to "celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream." Says he: "One has an impulse to bring glad tidings to someone. My sense of literature is a sense of giving, not a diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and that...
...Yorker's most versatile reporters-at-large. According to hour and season, Cheever skates and swims, drinks, dines, visits and walks. His home in Ossining is satisfactorily old (1790) in its history and comfortably modern in its appointments. Cheever has all the mannerisms of the proud landowner. He fiddles with his rotary mower or chain saw, or flails away with limited competence with an ax. He engages in target practice with his son, Ben, 15, who owns a Daisy air rifle. He worries about his unpruned apple trees, or Dutch disease in the elm where the orioles nest...