Word: cheevers
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...peculiar and original genius of Novelist John Cheever to see his chosen subject-the American middle class entering the second decade of the Affluent Society-as figures in an Ovidian netherworld of demons. Commuterland, derided by cartoonists and deplored by sociologists as the preserve of the dull-spirited status seeker, is given by Cheever's fables the dignity of the classical theater...
...this has escaped attention largely because the U.S. bourgeoisie has not been encouraged to think well of itself; indeed, it has been made accustomed to having its very virtues excoriated by the writing classes. More important, Cheever, like a demiurge disguised in street clothes, has hidden the demonic quality in his work under the conventional natural-shoulder style of the realistic story...
...copies a week, and has already topped the total sales of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle-although the Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958. Movie rights to both have been bought for $75,000, but it seems likely that any movie will mirror merely the realism. Cheever has been long acknowledged as a master of the short story, of which he has written over a hundred. Some are merely slick or O. Henryish, but some, such as The Country Husband, The Death of Justina, Goodbye, My Brother, are as perfect as a short story...
...Local Habitation. Cheever's art deals less with what is called character and idiosyncrasy than with archetypes: father, son, brother, husband, wife, lover, seen in situations so intensely felt as to claim universality. His people move like characters in classic drama; the actors wear their fixed masks and are not expected to change one mask for another in the course of the action. Over the formal masks are fitted others modeled in the naturalistic detail required by the conventions of realism. He is able to give to the abstract personalia of this theater a local habitation and a name...
...real life, Cheever country is that strip of New York's Westchester County that stretches from the Rockefeller estate in the Pocantico Hills along the wooded ridges of the Hudson's east shore to the estuary of the Croton River. "Except that he does not commute, John leads a fairly orthodox commuter's life," says his friend E. J. Kahn