Word: donaldson
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This biographer can hardly be blamed for the perverse effects of the Salinger case, i.e., the ability of an author who has not published a word since 1965 to squelch other words well into the litigious future. Nor is it Donaldson's fault that Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark scooped him by revealing her father's bisexuality. These handicaps are difficult but not necessarily ruinous. Unfortunately, John Cheever, which is certain to command wide attention because of its subject's fame, displays a range of self- inflicted weaknesses...
...most severe of these is Donaldson's prose style. Before his death in 1982 Cheever had regaled many interviewers and companions with tales of his past. The litany took on anecdotal grandeur: his glamorous New England ancestors, his childhood in Quincy, Mass., as the second son of a failed father and domineering mother, his expulsion from Thayer Academy, his struggles to make his name as a writer during the 1930s, and his growing < recognition as a regular contributor of short stories to The New Yorker; then marriage and three children -- Susan, Ben, Federico -- and the move to the exurbs north...
Never mind that many versions of this saga contradicted one another and the facts of the matter; they were invariably pithy and memorable. Donaldson's determination to set the record straight leads him to a repudiation of Cheever's freewheeling manner. Cliches seem to certify sober, scholarly research: "Life was not all fun and games, however" . . . "The New Yorker's taste was genteel, and as time wore on Cheever wrote about everything under the sun" . . . "Fred was the apple of his father...
Cheever would have groaned, or said something quite rude about such stale expressions. He was, after all, capable of describing himself as "intrinsically disheveled." Worse still, Donaldson seems only dimly aware of the discipline and artistry that went into Cheever's fiction. Two early stories, the biographer writes, "were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about." If "caring about" characters were truly a recipe for literary success, the world would be awash with masterpieces...
...Finally, Donaldson reveals an imprecise grasp of the narrative method, the notion that one thing leads to another. He alludes to a reconciliation between Cheever and his son Ben without ever having explained when or why they were estranged. And Donaldson writes, "As his fame grew, so did the local demands on his time from libraries, colleges, and civic and cultural associations." Exactly two pages later, this sentence obtrudes: "Cheever's reputation was at its nadir...