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Reader Reviews | |
Review by Cristina Frincu (310511) Rating (7/10) Review
by Cristina Frincu People from John Cheever's stories appear as if dressed in the definition of decorum, being so well-behaved, decent and polite, often active participants at family reunions and neighbourhood parties as well. Like any real coat, decorum is just a cloth, not to be mistaken for spiritual food or optimism infusion, much less for an imperfection remedy. Decorum covers a whole range of dramas that people you live with, in the same family or building, sharing the same bed or elevator, have to conquer. Decency often seems the carpet under which personal dirt hides. The dualistic personality of John Cheever's characters is available to view only after we meet their decorous side. After the first meeting the reader discovers meanness, banality, triviality, alcoholism, cheapness, a whole lot of faults, for short. It's not unusual for one of his fictional family fathers to ignore his child needs and concentrate on the decreasing number of alcohol bottles, or for the elevator man on duty on Christmas Day to scare the tenants after receiving many presents, food and liquor from them, by cruising the elevator at high speeds. It's like the writer himself finds impossible to create a character with a good essence. Cheever's women are the embodiment of personal frustration, of which they became aware after some apparently harmless events. The easiest solution that seems to fit every circumstance, once the revelation of a life outside the housewife boundaries being received, is divorce. Cheever appears unable to overcome some undefined, unknown obstacle between the masculine and the feminine; the opposite sex causes him not just the common perplexity of the man unable to understand a woman need to personal accomplishment, but also the revelation of a faulty , insufficient knowledge of the woman. "The extraordinary fact seemed to be that after 20 years o marriage I didn't know Cora well enough to know whether or not she intended to murder me." This estrangement from the feminine literary character parallels Cheever's personal life. Convinced that all their marriage problems come from his wife's difficult personality, the writer consults a psychiatrist, David Hays. Dr. Hays demolishes Cheever's conviction about his wife's hostility blaming the writer himself, who he characterizes as a "neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions that [he has] invented a manic-depressive wife." (Wikipedia, 2004) One of the MGM's executives, Leonard Spigelgass noticed Cheever's "childlike sense of wonder" (Wikipedia, 2004), a quality that conveys a positive attitude facing the meaningless days without any moral lessons or significant endings. These days outnumber the occasional life changing moments but they are seldom remembered or prized. In a world where everybody searches for his own meaning, Cheever seems to force the reader to observe, instead of rummaging through life. Like he pointed out in The Superintendent, sometimes life simply tells you to live: "The day had failed to have any meaning, and the sky seemed to promise a literal explanation. [...] Was that it? Chester asked, looking at the blue air as if he expected an answer to be written in vapour. But the sky told him only that it was a long day at the end of the winter, that it was late and time to go in."
Though a master of intense, limited scenes, of crucial moments
and apparently monotonous episodes with an unsuspected evolvement,
Cheever was accused of binding the facts too lose (Saturday Review,
1957), which gives his stories an inconsequent feature. The writer
argued sincerely, though harsh: "Our lives are not long and
well-told stories." (Scofield, 2006) |
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