Word: suburbanitis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...position as partner in the Jones, Day, Cockley, and Reavis law firm. He started work for the firm in 1951 and was made a partner seven years later. Along the way, he married a Radcliffe alumna in 1953 and joined a host of civic activities in Cleveland and his suburban home of Shaker Heights...
...emotional makeup was "total reaction. The only time she rested, she rested from exhaustion." She was born in Chicago, the sixth of seven children (three boys, four girls). After her father moved his business, the multimillion-dollar Great Lakes Carbon Corp., to New York, the family lived briefly in suburban Larchmont and then on a 16-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn...
...fill the current American prescription for a tragedy with a pain-killing happy ending, it should be made clear that Cheever means by his four "wonderfuls" very much the same bitter things conveyed in the famous five "nothings" of King Lear. There are no dizzy precipices edging the smug suburban surface of Bullet Park. There is, however, the "portable abyss" of the commuter's 7:46 a.m. to Grand Central...
Befuddled Blessedness. Structurally the book seems simple: a narrative about the struggle between suburban neighbors unabashedly named Hammer and Nailles. The latter, Eliot Nailles, is an apparently commonplace industrial chemist who now sells a spiffy mouthwash. A churchgoer, country clubman, volunteer fireman and commuter, Nailles, in most modern literary hands, might emerge as a figure of fun. Cheever loves him, however, and sees in his dominant character istics-passionate monogamy, joy in small things, and especially in his inarticulate love for his teen-age son Tony-a kind of befuddled blessedness. It is a quality not unlike Billy Budd...
Abraham and Isaac. Beyond an unfashionable admiration for all that is chaste, honorable and orderly in the world, John Cheever has always been notable for social perceptions that seem superficial but somehow manage to reveal (and devastate or exalt) the subjects of his suburban scrutiny. Much of this book, too, is composed of his customary skillful vignettes in which apparent slickness masks real feeling...