Word: ovidian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...