The Stories of John Cheever

I wanted to like this work but kept feeling myself getting irritated. Cheever has a remarkable knack of repeating sections of dialogue a little too long, or putting passages of text the wrong way round. Almost without fail I was frustrated with the construction of a story; "How much sharper, more satisfactory," I thought to myself, "if he had put this section before (or after) the other one!" And if I can see that...
When I purchased this book I can only assume that I mistook Cheever for Raymond Carver, who (if I'm correct in my assumption) I've read before and liked.

I read parts of multiple stories but found none that I wanted to read in its entirety. The writing is good but the stories and characters are boring, like a soap opera without the opera: nothing but suds here.

The characters in these stories are really hard to relate to or feel sympathy for. All the stories seem to be about wealthy, pampered, entitled society snobs, or people who aspire to that status. It's kind of interesting for the first few stories, but just gets old after awhile. I ended up putting it down.

Does most people here give this book four and five stars because of who the author is, someone they've heard of before, and they want to seem highbrow, too? This is a long book, so did they even read the stories? Those are my questions. I read the book. There are 62 stories in all. 10 of them were OK to not bad, while only one was pretty good--"The Enormous Radio." Which means the rest--51, about 5/6 of the book--were subpar to atrocious. The GOOD news is that I now have another Pulitzer under my belt in my quest to read all the fiction prize winners. So on the shelf it will stay, never to be read again. Except for "The Enormous Radio." I'll read that one again.

I picked up the Cheever collection that’s been on my shelf most of my lifetime and read another twenty or so of the stories. I didn’t remember much of an impression from my dabbling in Cheever thirty or more years ago. I discovered an amazing talent with sophisticated layers of insights into suburban modern life that I probably never noticed when I last read Cheever in the early 1980s.

Cheever is both jarring and sparkling, artistic and surgical, detached and deeply involved. Cheever draws the reader into very close proximity to his characters. He is writing about the city, the neighborhood, the living room with cocktails, and the individuals with entrenched social identities and qualities of the place and time. He brings them to life with the blazing banality of a moment in everyday life; with severe detours from comfortable banality; and very awkward scenes steeped in blasé, all with inventiveness depicting the uniqueness of the characters’ particular circumstances.

Cheever gives us brilliant accuracy in the details of the personalities, conditions, disappointments, hopes, emptiness, filled with universals of life that reach every human from anyplace and anytime.

Robert Rose-Coutre
Author of Screenformation

I was really impressed with John Cheever’s “Goodbye My Brother.” Truth is the motive and enemy. It is not the goal to be obtained but the goal to be avoided at all costs, even if it means a drastic distortion of reality. Cheever achieves this in the flawed first person point of view. The question of trust in the narrator thrusts the reader instantly into the information-filled, but honesty-wanting account of this family and the visit of Lawrence.

***Spoilers*** The last line of the epilogue conveys the tragic extent to which the narrator hopes to keep his illusions. I love the way the image of his wife and sister swimming are interpreted in his eyes as a baptismal cleansing of their moral imperfections. It is brilliant the way the Sea, as a literary device used as a symbol of life and death, is depicted as women rising from it victoriously over the lies and negativity that Lawrence symbolized. The narrator’s refusal to accept the ugliness of the family – alcoholism, promiscuity, and house decay—has caused him to lose even more moral sensibility. Cheever shines here by illustrating a intuitive grasp of the Freudian theory that all neuroses branch out from that troublesome one called Denial.

This is an unabashed open love letter to the stories of John Cheever. He may not have been a feminist, but his literary exploration of the human spirit ultimately lifts itself above all categorization. He was the first writer I read whose words made me thrill to the power of literary precision, words couched in such a way that I felt an immediate excitement of spiritual recognition: I wasn't the only person on earth to have such thoughts and feelings. I spent entire days reading and re-reading his stories to attempt to tease out from them the elements rendering their singular majesty that, in Durrell's words, removed the sack cloth covering the cloth of gold. Those elements are no more discernible or reproducible than a Gauguin painting or a poem by Dickinson. They are the style generated by the man: unique and timeless.

I am saddened that Cheever is not as widely read today as he was 30 years ago. Whenever I feel particularly disheartened or uninspired, I pick up my volume of Cheever short stories and begin to read. My boredom evaporates. My lights (a Cheeverism if there ever was one) are sublimely invigorated. I feel that sense of rightness he described in communing with nature, or the serenity he found in his yellow walls. His work seemed always to come out of the question: how do you live when you feel too much? They are a balm of Gilead for the afflicted soul.

His biographies and journals confirm that he was a lonely, conflicted, self-destructive man who escaped his torment by writing himself out of it. I am often baffled and distressed by the harsh, unforgiving condemnation readers feel obliged to levy against writers whose personal lives are littered with scandal, abuse, narcissism, self-destruction, rebellion, selfishness, hubris, and dereliction--as if the worth and validity of an artist's work were contingent on a person's moral and spiritual fitness. If that were the case, the majority of the world's art would be thrown into the trash. Carl Jung wrote: "Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process...The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him...To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being...The personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art--but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet...There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire..."

The only thing that should matter in any artist's life is the rich legacy he leaves behind in his work, and John Cheever's stories are as illuminating as they are eviscerating. (Read "The Swimmer" or "Goodbye, My Brother" which are minaturist depictions of the cosmos of human strife.) Although more often than not he wrote about a particular segment of society--some complain of his preoccupation with Connecticut WASPs--Cheever was a universalist and his only occupation was plumbing the inscrutable depths of the human heart in trying to understand. As are we all.

This is a great book. The stories have two common themes - decorum is a facade and man is mean and small. Some of the stories that I especially liked follow.

The Radio - A radio plays the lives of people in other apartments. The woman listening is appalled at the way
others live. But is she that much unlike them?

Torch Song - A long friendship is based on facades. What poses as gentleness and concern is vulture-like.

The Cure - We live with delusions of life and happiness that keep us going. Take away our delusions and
sanity goes as well.

The Bus to St. James - This is about a mid-life affair and much more.

The Trouble of Marcie Flint - A Man seeks to seduce a shallow woman. He does this by telling her she is
smart.

The Wrysons - A great story! Is ordinariness unique? i Is uniqueness ordinary?

The Country Husband - A man falls in love with his babysitter.

The Scarlet Moving Van - A family moves from town to town. The man is a lush and uses people. Others feel
guilty when they do not allow themselves to be used.

The Lowboy - Things are reminiscent of the people who owned them.

The Educated American Woman - Women's liberation can be a facade for emptiness and actually epitomize
what it seeks to destroy.

Metamorphoses - Like the story suggests, this is about changes in three characters.

Montraldo - A woman and her servant have a sado-masochistic relationship.

The Ocean - This is an exquisitely beautiful story about one man's suspicions, confusions, misguided hopes
and trusts.

The Swimmer - An incredibly fine story from which a major movie was made. It is about an odyssey across
the county via swimming pools.

I can't say enough about the brilliance of Cheever's short stories and give this book my highest recommendation.

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Highly recommended.
John Cheever has long had a reputation as the quintessential American writer of the 20th century, and this collection, which he edited, is illustration of why he is a favourite of the American literati.
Cheever's stories are populated by mostly mundane people in mundane settings-the corporate executive and rising stars who go home every night to an affluent suburb like Shady Hill, with its unforgettable recurring cast of characters (the Beardens, the Farquarson, the Parminters) who live on such unforgettable streets as Alewives Lane; the New York City elevator operator whose life consists of going up and down all day and whose mind and imagination never leave their comfortable paths; other apartment building workers, half of whose lives are spent on the fringe of luxury and the other half in grimy poverty; the thoughtless affluent who cannot conceive of any other life; the downwardly mobile who have no choice but to lower their level of existence closer to that of their former servants and who cannot seem to grasp that things will never be what they once were; the social outcasts, like Mrs. Hewing, who is "kind of immoral"; the former duchesses and other members of the old European elite who wear their rags with grace while their estate homes crumble around them; the expatriates who fit in neither where they come from nor where they live; and the travelers who find tragedy awaits at the end of the trip with the death of their child-or even the beginning of the journey of their doomed marriage.
What sets the stories and the characters-and Cheever-apart is the surreal nature of so much of what happens in the course of these vignettes. Instead of addressing an addiction like alcoholism directly, Cheever tells of an ordinary woman who cannot stop listening to her neighbours as their lives, their arguments, their loves, and their passions are voiced over a new radio her husband has bought for her in "The Enormous Radio." The birth and course of the affliction are seamlessly revealed through Irene Westcott's inability to withdraw from vicariously living through her neighbours' conversations. "The Five-Forty-Eight" reveals how an ordinary event-sexual relations between executive and assistant-can lead to the humiliation of a confident, secure man, who finds himself falling into the filth, while the disturbed and wronged ex-assistant is finally free of the demons he helped to feed while ignorant of their existence. In "The Swimmer," which takes place on a Sunday where the recurring refrain is, "I drank too much" can be heard at every home, Neddy Merrill decides to go home from a party by swimming across the county through all the pools in between his host's home and his own-a novel idea taken to its surreal level as the weather and the trees change, and Neddy finds himself lost in a world where he knows what has become of himself but not how or why.
The world of John Cheever is primarily male; the vast majority of the stories are told by a man in the first person. The women whom they encounter range from their tired wives to their enigmatic lovers-and, in the case of the third of "Three Stories," an enigmatic wife. Sex is central to many of the tales; the happily and the miserably married are in many cases equally open to sexual adventure and excitement if occasionally afraid of the consequences. It is the rare protagonist who would voice the thoughts of one incidental character: "After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps." ("The Country Husband")
It is fascinating to watch Cheever's subjects and style evolve from the 1920s and '30s to the 1960s-from an era of elevator men, fedoras, ubiquitous cigarettes, Martinis (with a capital "M"), and "affairs" to a time when "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger" can refer to the sexual act by its most unacceptable term and be whisked off to Washington, D.C., for making the mistake of falling in love in the U.S.S.R.
The surfaces here are untroubled, but the depths roil with repressed thoughts and emotions that are typical of Shady Hill and its ilk-but are neither acknowledged nor acceptable. Nearly everyone, whether they live in New York, Shady Hill, or Rome, is desperately seeking something-love, sex, passion, something-anything-to lift them above the towers of the city skyline where they work and the chimneys of the suburban trap they cannot-and really do not wish to-escape. An empty life is still a life of social acceptability.
Diane L. Schirf, 1 September 2002.

John Cheever ranks as one of masterful short story writers of the twentieth century--as this collection clearly shows. Cheever offers wonderful glances at people from the 30s-70s learning to adjust to life in America during that time--the rise of the suburbs, the perils of prosperity, the conflicts between romantic ideals and normal life.

While Cheever went out of his way to ignore his earlier stories--those found in "The Way Some People Live"--most of his major stories are included here including "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Swimmer." Most of these stories focus on Manhattan and its suburbs in Westchester County but there are occasionally looks at New England and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Cheever is an excellent craftsman of sentences and paragraphs. Even in the limited form of short stories, Cheever is a fine revealer of character.

This is an excellent collection of stories and readers will be enriched. Even the stories that do not measure up to the rest of the collection are still solid--Cheever is that skilled a writer. Highly recommended.

I love this collection. Of the short story collections that I have read, this is my favorite. I suppose I could end the review there but I won't.

These stories date from the 40s through the late 70s. He writesout suburbia and about people that should be happy but aren't. He writes about the desperation underlying people living in the 50s and 60s happy America. Men cheat, women cheat and people routinely act with mean spirit. The stories are always creative and frequently surprising. They are unsentimental and hard hitting.

Perhaps the best comparisons that I can think of are Updike's Rabbit series or later, the work of Jonathan Franzen.

The characters frequently have affairs, drink too much, make bad decisions, mourn getting old and judge others.

A previous reviewer described the stories as small masterpieces and I can't say it any better than that.

It would be a tragedy if Cheever's work was forgotten. I give this my highest recommendation.

Born in 1912, John Cheever gives a unique survey of the bright American mid-century through his stories. Like his literary brother, John Updike, having a life both lucky and lusty hardly spoilt his acuity.
Cheever made his name as the laureate of Shady Hill, a pleasant post-war borough of bliss and torment, just a train ride beyond Manhattan.
Many of these stories were initially penned for the New Yorker magazine. In the original 1979 introduction to this omnibus, he gently mocks its "dated paraphernalia".
The stories still soar beyond their time, through a faultless touch for manners and mores. For Cheever's natural field of study is "decorum" as he puts it. This he studies with great artifice but never drily.
Once imagined, savoured and named, "The Enormous Radio" could only have been his. This monstrous gift mysteriously pipes the loves and quarrels of surrounding families into the apartment of a "satisfactorily average" couple. Surreal snatches of Edward Lear bedtime reading are siphoned in. The couple lose their usual protective static and face again their own wickedness.
From this early classic, Cheever went on to love and lampoon the Shady Hill domain, its interlocking characters playing out their dramas on Alewives Lane. There, a man may luckily recoup venial and mortal sins, but equally may forfeit everything on a pratfall.
Life's fateful turns are observed with a fine mixture of acid and sympathy. The accomplished grandmother of "An Educated American Woman" cables her accomplished daughter, in perfect Italian, that she cannot make it back from Italy for her grandson's death.
Cheever's striking use of the rhythms and progressions of fairytale is a bonus. In "The Children", the hapless servant Victor stumbles like a lost medieval courtier to ever-declining situations. "The Swimmer's" suburban pool-crawl starts as an alcoholic dare and ends in witchy desolation.
One hand guarding the meal ticket from his comfortable readership, Cheever managed brave sleight of hand with the other. Rarely does he descend into Saturday Evening Post mawkishness.
The 60 stories amassed from five previous collections give a satisfying sense of a skill husbanded and used over a long period, just about as well as we can ask of a writer. Cheever responded to the continuous assessment demands of his craft as did few writers in the class of the 20th century short story.
[The West Australian, Saturday February 23 1991]

The late John Cheever could not only tell a story well. He also could make each word count to ultimately paint a complex portrait of a certain type of person and his life, (less often her life). This was the upperclass, or marginal thereto, person who when in a city was in New York and when in the suburbs went by train to CT. Even more telling though was that Cheever's eye could see in a person's smallest gesture, or his passingest moment, everything you would ever need to know about him. Cheever exposed the underside of what was going on in life for this person. The world might seem sunny and simple when a Cheever story begins but by its end the world is rendered in all its complexity in the sparest of prose. I read Cheever's novels too but it was in his short stories that his genius as a writer shone forth best. Each story in this collection is stunning and well worth owning forever.

Visit my blog with link given on my profile page here or use this phonetically given URL (livingasseniors dot blogspot dot com). Friday's entry will always be weekend entertainment recs from my 5 star the store reviews in film, tv, books and music. These are very heavy on buried treasures and hidden gems. My blogspot is published on Monday, Wednesday & Friday.

Sixty one stories are collected in these nearly 700 pages of short story brilliance. The majority of these stories average around ten pages and all reach some sort of conclusion--in other words, these tales don't appear to be part of some bigger story where the reader is left hanging. Each story stands well on its own.
These well-told vignettes often end badly (for the characters, not the reader) but they give a timeless and perceptive glimpse into humanity. Particularly revealing (these stories were written between the late 1940s and early 1970s) under Cheever's trenchent pen are the lifestyles of Northeast America's affluent. Troubled relationships (parent-child, sibling, spousal, lovers, friends, etc.) are the focus of the majority of these tales and each sheds light on the behavior of mankind and the effect of choices made (both right and wrong). Most of these stories are set in wealthy suburbs or overseas where the characters are usually stocked with cash and often boozed to the hilt. As you might imagine, not all ends well.
In short, these are some of the best short stories ever written, each revealing in its own way and told with beauty and grace by one of America's greatest writers. Highly Recommended.

John Cheever was the best American writer. No, I'm not just talking about of his era; I mean ever. It's true. Sure, glancing over his novels, you might find yourself checking ahead occasionally, enjoying yourself, caught up in the vivid lives of his creations, then going back and marvelling over the absolute perfection of his language, of the narrative structure, of every single itty bitty word chalk outlined around these actual lives. Then there are his shorter works.
In this book failure exists only to the characters of the stories. John Cheever was and still remains the quintessential American short story writer (and no matter what trends pervert society in unimaginably futuristic ways, pompous or well-read people will still try to copy his style). This book, in my aloof and often condescending opinion, is the second finest collection of short fiction I have ever read (behind the still thriving William Trevor's endless Collected Stories which is only superior because its nearly twice the length). I am an American and American lives, American incidents, American dreams and failures are what finally interest me because I know no other way. This is not a book of fiction but a cleanly scrubbed window into reality of place and time and day to day to day to day of people like you, people like me, people like that jerk across the street and that unattainable sweetheart down the lane. Here is America without the slam bam rhythm of our exaggerated selves. Here is America unable to fall asleep from rumination of its uncertainties and shame.
Don't say I didn't warn you--

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though.

There are the classics, like "The Swimmer", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", and my personal favorite, "Reunion", which more than live up to the hype. Then there are the rest, which are a notch below. Some are boring, some are unsatisfying, and some just flat out go on too long and don't know when to end. Still, when taken as a whole, these stories provide a fascinating glimpse into the lives of those living in the East coast after the second World War, urban and suburban, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful.

As Cheever notes in his fascinating introduction, reading these stories is sometimes like taking a glimpse into a lost and vanished world. Still, it's a world which he captures in exacting and thorough detail, in his own unique voice, and that reason alone makes this a compelling and rewarding collection, that, in its totality,
is a classic.

Virtually everything John Cheever ever wrote is worth reading; and I include his letters, some of which are achingly beautiful.

This volume includes many stories Cheever wrote from shortly after the Second World War up to the book's publication in 1978. To me, this is an almost perfect book; pick it up one evening after dinner and settle into a comfortable chair and read 2 or 3 stories, then set the book down for a week or a month or a year. You will come back to it again and again as I have since I purchased the book when it was published 30 years ago. It holds a valuable space in my bookshelves which are, to a certain extent, laden with books that are eminently forgettable.

It seems to me that Cheever is in danger of being forgotten. He may be the quintessential "WASP" writer and, as such, much of what he has written seems trapped in another time. But what a lovely and seemingly innocent time it was, before computers and the Internet and when television was in its infancy.

I do not mean to suggest that Cheever's longer works, his novels, are no longer great reading. Indeed they are, but in my view he reached his apogee in the short story form.

Like most good short story writers, John Cheever has his niche in time and place. His is the world of New York middle class life in the 1940s -- as he himself puts it, "when almost everyone wore hats." It was also, it seems, a time when every man worked a nine to five office job and took the commuter train home to Shady Hill. A time when his wife, who regretted giving up her talent and ambition for the life of a lonely housewife, would either have an affair with the milkman or pass her time shopping and catching matinees in the city. A time when cocktail parties were the Friday night routine, and every other family was named Farquarson. Yes, this is Waspy America at its peak, in its heyday, and no one that I know of has captured it so crisply, so honestly, and so compassionately, as John Cheever. If F. Scott Fitzgerald captured a generation in the 1920s, the same can be said of Cheever two decades later.

I used to avoid Cheever the way I avoided Updike. They're just WASPS writing about there minor drinking problems in Connecticut. I bought "The World of Apples" but never read it. Then one day I saw the story "Montraldo" in an airline magazine and read it and it changed everything. Not just my perceptions of Cheever, but everything I thought about literature, writing, short stories and life.
These stories are the kind, that if you read them carefully, expose the humanity in everyone, the desperate possibilites of humanity. These stories are the stories we need to survive life. They are not about WASPS in New England. They are about the human spirit in the modern world, they are about the necessity of the self.
Cheever, when all is said and done is a better short story writer than Carver, Beattie and just about anyone but Donald Bartheleme.

There are two art forms that are American in origin: jazz and the short story. And when you think of the best short story writers, you think of Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. Cheever has been called the Chekhov of the American short story. Cheever's stories deal with suburban life, but with a bit of surrealism in it. And this Pulitzer prize winning collection is a must have on any list. It contains two of the best short stories ever written, "The Swimmer" and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Some of the other of Cheever's best are: "The Enormous Radio", "Torch Song", "The Cure", "The Sorrows of Gin", "O Youth and Beauty!", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", "The Worm in the Apple", "The Country Husband", "The Scarlet Moving Van", "The Music Teacher", "The Brigadier and Gold Widow", "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger". These short stories will show why Cheever is one of America's best.

I recently made a lengthy automobile trip through a boring section of the country, and I spent much of the drive listening to these stories. Of the sixty-odd pieces in this collection, almost all of them first published in _The New Yorker_, I'd previously read maybe one-third, especially the more famous and heavily anthologized ones like "The Swimmer." But my favorites are those in which Cheever experimented with style and content, like "The Enormous Radio" and "The Country Husband" and "The Wrysons" and "Goodbye My Brother." Cheever invented the "New York story" in which the characters are ordinary people living generally ordinary lives, but by whom the reader becomes fascinated. And the last paragraph always seems to tie up the narrative in a neat surgical knot. Amazingly good stuff.

What makes this volume so magnificent is that each reviewer will give their favorite stories, and they will all be different. That's because every story by Cheever is touching, compelling and profound and it's impossible not be be affect by each one in some way. My personal favorites are "The Common Day," "The Swimmer," "The Death of Justina," and "The Wrysons." But everyone story is worth reading and more importantly, worth rereading. Cheever's characters beg to be reevaulted and reconsidered. They are fully realized people in a world that touches closely on the mythical and even more closely to the tragic.
I didn't really need to write this review because so many people have well stated what makes these stories so wonderful. But I've rarely been so affected by a work and if my two cents are extra encouragement for someone to read Cheever, that would be great

You owe it your bookshelf to own this compendium of John Cheever stories. I borrowed mine from the library, and thought I'd read perhaps half in the alloted time. Renewed once, then let the fines pile up, as I kept reading "just one more story." One a night is perfect bedtime reading...but with nearly 5 dozen stories...well you get the picture.
These are dark, dark tales of life at its zenith...ultra confident, comfortable post-war America. Florid description, rich portraiture, and slick storylines, Cheever's stories contain more than a few eye-popping twists and surprise endings. All the hallmarks of championship short-stories.
Warning: Restock the cabinet with gin and imagine the vermouth before reading. Cheever serves his Martini with a capital M.

John Cheever was a master storyteller who examined the relationships and prosperity and pitfalls of life in suburbia during the middle of the twentieth century and my writing teachers were forever trying to force this collection on me (and which I am glad they did). Some of the best stories are those with unusual characters and motives, such as the hallucinated girlfriend in "The Chimera," the man swimming home through the river of backyard pools in "The Swimmer," the Italian prince who movies into the neighborhood of "Another Story," and the secretary's revenge on her boss in "The Five-Forty Eight." But there are plenty of rowdy couples for entertainment's sake -- the Beers of "Just One More Time," the Pyms of "Just Tell Me Who It Was," the Warburtons of "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," and the Bentleys of "O Youth and Beauty." Among my favorite stories are "Reunion," about a father and son reunion in Grand Central station, and "Clancy in the Tower of Babel," about an elevator man and his building's tenants. Other classics include "The Lowboy," about brothers squabbling over an inheritance, "The Bus To St. James," about the extramarital affairs of parents, and "The Sorrows of Gin," about the effects of alcoholism on a family as seen through the eyes of a girl.

Most of my students scratch their heads and mutter "Who?" when I tell them they will be reading the selected stories of John Cheever. When I tell them that Cheever is a representative of upper crusty, mid-twentieth century, cosmopolitan American cities, the sighs and groans can be heard crosstown.
Then they read the stories: "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Swimmer", "The Enormous Radio"... And the discussions are as lively as any instructor could hope for.
And their excitement reminds me over and again of the thrill I had reading these stories for the first time. (I'm almost jealous of my students--I miss that first time pleasure.) These are stories perfect in their craftsmanship, memorable in their characters, and decidedly superior to anything of his time, and just about anything since. Pick up this collection and enjoy.
Rocco Dormarunno,
College of New Rochelle

As a writer of short stories, (Bearings) I'm often reading for the 'how' in another's prose, and admire Cheever's ability create a character in a few deft strokes. In A Vision of the World a girl in a passing parade `marched with her pelvis so far in advance of the rest of her that her spine was strangely curved. She wore bifocals and seemed terribly bored by this forwardness of her pelvis...' Mid-century apartment buildings are often the backdrop for Cheever's fine sense of the heaving sympathies and antipathies between people. Irene in The Enormous Radio discovers she can use her new radio to eavesdrop on her neighbours. She can't resist tuning into the "demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, vanity, faith and despair" - which is a pretty good description of reading Cheever, really. You can't go past Cheever for a great short story. He's a master.

Like any large collection of short fiction (and here Cheever's stories weight in at 693 pages in my edition) there is a great deal of material here that is of marginal quality. But for the reader who can hang on through Cheever's innumerable attempts to hammer out the same themes with relentless consistency (the rented summer home, the failed vacation, the desperate office manager, the expatriate in Italy living a dream of surreal desperation) this work is well worth reading for the surprises one encounters along the way. Cheever surmounts himself at some points; some stories reach a sublime level which is only hinted at in the less successful attempts. For writers, the large-collection-of-short-stories- taken-from-a-life-time-of-writing can be instructional texts. How do we retell our Ur story in new and refreshing ways? How do we surmount our own story, to get at something both more primal and more novel?

John Cheever, though also a novelist, is best known for his many short stories depicting American suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s. This book contains the best of those stories, many of them set in the fictional neighborhoods of Shady Hill and Bullet Park. He takes ordinary events such as the purchase of a new radio or a son's meeting his father for dinner, and injects them with humor, wisdom, and even tragedy. Many of the stories are set in Italy, where Cheever lived for several years, thus proviidng an interesting contrast to the suburban American way of life. Anyone who likes reading short stories should own a copy of this book

In most cases the leading characters are ordinary people and the events chronicled are typical of ordinary life. However, the viewpoints expressed are unusual so that exceptional outcomes become unexpected and the stories interesting.

This is one of the best short story American books I've read. Cheever narrates these stories about ordinary people in a simplistic and nervous fashion. Cheever subtlety describes his characters as pathetic in a sarcastic way but effectively manages to get his readers to like them. His stories are at times shady, moralistic, and mystical that keeps you practically glued to the pages of the book. My favorites are The Swimmer, and The Enormous Radio. Even though his topics touch on the lives of the so called "Wasps", I don't think you have to be one, but have the knowledge of how people that live in quiet desperation live in order to understand and enjoy Cheever's writings.

John Cheever has not been favored by the passage of the years. In the sixties and seventies Cheever was America's most lauded writer of short stories and justly so. With the exception of J.D. Salinger, no writer of "the New Yorker" school so succeeded in portraying the time of the lives of middle-class New Yorkers of the post-war generation. Cheever was the unparalleled master of middle-aged angst, particularly as it affected men and his urban sketches have lost none of their power with the passing of the years. A handful of the stories collected in this book are certified classics-the Swimmer, Reunion-and there is not a clunker among them. If you despair about the state of the literary world, do yourself a favor and check out the work of one of the greatest American treasures, John Cheever.

In his collection of short stories, John Cheever has given us an insight into postwar America and its people. Some dejected and unemployed, others riding the wealth of war bonds and called-in favors. Not a great departure in style from his novels "Falconer" and "Bullet Park", The Stories of John Cheever displays his smooth prose, wonderful voice and best of all, his imaginative use of simplistic human character to transform each short story into a page turner - if only for a page! In my opinion, no one before or since has captured the time and place of postwar America quite as well as Cheever; in some instances I forget I'm reading fiction, and in others I can't help but chuckle at the far-flung tales of a lover crossing an ocean to escape life and pursue love.

The Stories of John Cheever is an absolute must read for any fan of short stories, American literature, or just having a good time while reading; the length of each story affords the reader the luxury of just catching a quick break, or propping their feet and staying a while to indulge in this wonderful collection of Americana.

These stories are about the everyday lives of extraordinary people. The appeal to one's own sense of tragic glory that one sees in the Cheever's characters is supremely effective. But the greatest accomplishment in these stories is the juxtaposition of completely rational plots worked through rationally by confoundingly coplex characters. Cheever's peel back the pretense of American WASPs and show us the bare souls of men we would otherwise be content to avoid and dismiss.

Cheever is a master of the short story. This collection is deep and wide, but every story seems to stand on its own. The charters and landscapes are mostly sad and unhopeful, the dark underbelly of the human condition. These people were your neighbors growing up in the 1950's. Not a time I think we should go back to. Was post-war America ever really that great?

Cheever could pour out the histories of Long Island life as easily as he could a cocktail.

You can hear the craggy voice while faint far away the evening bay waves lap.

Sometimes, he wanders, and wanders. But in the best instances, he does return to some thought close to where he began

Of the three big realistic American Johns, along with Steinbeck and Updike, Cheever fits well in the middle, a mean--in both senses.

He stands square between Steinbeck's good hand in the practical lower classes and Updike's dazzling nose on the ambitious upper classes.

Cheever's hand is as steady as his characters' are not.

I feel I could build one of his houses just from the sensations you get from the best of these stories.

Cheever must stand as one of the great short story writers in American literary history. These stories offer insight into the minds of different types of characters -- alcoholics, businessmen, wives, lovers and up-and-comers. Yes, Cheever presents a mural which, when taken in at once, is both cathartic and glorious -- a testament to his own imagination and to the spririt of America which he so eloquently and masterfully transcribes into a modern classic. If any stories must be read, I recommend "Farewell, My Brother," and "The Swimmer." Both conjure up the feelings which we so often experience in our own lives, and which Cheever describes so beautifully. This collection joins the cannon of world literature as a work which can be read and re-read throughout the years.

Like Hemingway and Carver, Cheever is among a handful of the most influential short-story writers America has ever produced, but unlike his peers, he is also one of the world's greatest storytellers. Do you know of another writer with a greater command and versatility with the narrative? It sometimes seems to me that virtually every writer out there is not writing stories at all, but anecdotes. Cheever wrote stories, great ones, and in the tradition of Chekhov and Maupaussant.
I loved "The Country Husband," "The Swimmer," "Torch Song," "The Angel of the Bridge," "The Scarlet Moving Van," "Clancy in the Towel of Babel," and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Every single story in this book is from very good to awesome; there isn't a single stinker. If you are a young writer you must read Cheever; and not just for the sweet prose style or the distinct dialogues or the impeccable construction, but because he makes the craft of writing seems so exciting and possible and noble.

Of all the archetypal New Yorker short story writers of the Twentieth Century- John O'Hara, John Updike, Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger- perhaps the best of them was John Cheever- and he was certainly the best of the three big Johns. That said, I do not particularly like John Cheever's stories. Of the over sixty tales in this collection a good thee quarters involved characters that do not personally interest me- mid-Twentieth Century upper crust whites, martini-totaling who seem as stranded on the island of Manhattan, or his fictive suburb of Shady Hill, physically as their views of the world are intellectually. In his world even middle class people have maids. But, almost all of the tales are tight and well-wrought, and that's an important distinction to note when reviewing, for few critics are able to separate themselves from their biases and inclinations. That said, while the tales are good, and at their best, very good, excellent, and even near-great, there isn't a one that really leapt out as being inarguably great, mostly because they are tales that work on only one or two levels, even when ricjly layered. This is because they follow a formula, the New Yorker formula, and follow it well, but Cheever never achieves an expansion of his character's worlds the way he tinkers incessantly with the interior narrative structures. To use a metaphor, his stories are solidly and well built, but the interior decorating can be atrocious.

His tales almost always start off with a good and/or arresting start, and his ends are also usually quite deft. The middle sometimes sag, in even the best tales, not because of length, but because the tales are so dependent upon their extreme supports.... Technically, Cheever also pulls off marvelous turns of narrative direction that can leave one with a wholly unexpected ending, as judged by a tale's start, but wholly realistic if reading the tale. There is also a dealing with the same themes and life events that occurs in many of the tales. In Just Tell Me Who It Was a rich, successful older man finds out his younger wife has cuckolded him, and attacks the man he suspects did it, in public, but unlike the scene in Goodbye, My Brother, the violence flows naturally from the story elements that lead up to it. Another element from Goodbye, My Brother that is reworked more successfully in another tale occurs in The Seaside Houses, in which the end of a marriage and the passage of time are all summed up in a fleeting instant by the narrator. It is a tale void of the melodrama of the lesser tale that shares its themes. That the two better tales were published in the New Yorker in 1978 and the lesser one in 1951 should not surprise. The depth and richness of the later tales is evident. Yet, a brief tale like Reunion, in which a father and son briefly reunite, never to see each other again, is also terrifically wrought and almost lyrical.

Yet, as good as he can be, his tales should be read sparingly, because too many in a row tends to manifest the New Yorkerish weaknesses in his short story corpus: suburbia, adultery, middle class purgatory, fedoras, regretful housewives, and cocktail parties that all become fairy taleish, and are topped off with a climactic three or four sentence epiphany. John O'Hara may have invented that genre, but Cheever brought it to its apex, and- as shown- the epiphanies can be marvelous. In a sense, one might argue he personified the post-World War Two generation in fiction the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age. Fortunately, though, Cheever is the far superior short story stylist because his tales are not as hermetically walled off to the contemporary reader as those of Fitzgerald, and therefore more emotionally more accessible, especially when limning schlubs. Yet, many of Cheever's tales, as formulaic as they could be, also broke the fourth wall, or commented slyly on themselves, pointing up the lie that Postmodernism was anything new or revolutionary. And, in Cheever's story, the devices actually enhance or serve the tales, and are not mere accoutrements to blow the writer's own horn, and solipsistically preen on their coolness. The art comes first in Cheever's tales. Look at how he describes a simple act in The Enormous Radio, a tale about an old woman who loses herself in another world:

....The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio.

The Stories Of John Cheever may not be the best Twentieth Century American fiction had to offer, but it's emblemic. To not read or not understand these tales is to be as void of the American character as ignoring Dickens is to the English character or Chekhov is to the Russian character of the prior century. Read the book, learn from it, and seek out those who will do even more for this century.

Who would have believed that among all those closet victorians living in Shady Hill lurked such passion and antics? These stories are so rewarding to read: they are well crafted tales and they are short, many only 10 or so pages long. It is impossibile to read this collection and not have 8-10 favorites.

I must agree with the last few entries here. There is absolutely no way seven dollars can better be spent. This book is my bible. This book is like Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak. A literary collection such as this will never be outdone.

This is a fantastic collection of stories. Cheever is a master of setting up a situation, making you like or dislike the main characters (sometimes at the same time), and providing a satisfying (or shocking) ending. I found myself either smiling or gasping at the end of each story. Highly recommended. Personal favorites: Torch Song and Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.

I can't think of another American short story writer who has pushed the bounderies of the form as much as Cheever. He is a true virtuoso and this book, the collected stories, is a necessary companion for any serious writer.

John Cheever is the poet of mid-century suburbia. He stings as he sings, gently criticizing a lifestyle that he at the same time embraces and loves. "The Swimmer" is a tour-de-force; had Cheever been South American, the story would have been labeled magic realism.

Interesting and enlightening to read. So far I've only read the sample but am planning to read the whole thing. you might also likeMILFS GILFS and Trailer Park Women

I received the wrong book, albeit in a timely fashion, and bookmotto not only refunded me my purchase and shipping and told me to enjoy the book that had been incorrectly sent, but they sent the correct book at no charge. I replied that I was happy to pay for the purchase of the correct book and would accept the other gratefully, but they wrote back and said no, both books would be free of charge and to enjoy them. In this day and age of generally poor customer service, it is refreshing to run into someone who is considerate, professional and understands business and taking responsibility for their mistakes. I would order from them again in a heartbeat. These are the companies I want to see succeed, the ones who truly care about their customers and make things right.

I've been reading the stories from this collection for over fifteen years and I've always found something heartbreaking, sobering, and redeeming about the people and places in Cheever's world. And I'm not even close to being a WASP. John Cheever's art is truly universal and I hope that two, three hundred years from now, his work will continue to be read and cherished.

John Cheever tells his short, thought bending stories with the eye of a pained man. In the swimmer he outlines the deapths of alcoholism with an eye to detail and a symbolism that provkes great loss.