Word: cheever
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Susan Cheever...
Books by the children of famous authors are guaranteed an interested or curious audience. On the debit side, the comparisons that follow are likely to be odious. Susan Cheever, 36, accepts this mixed blessing with considerable panache. She never pretends to write like her old man, John, the sage of Ossining, but she alludes regularly and playfully to his imposing presence. When her heroine, Salley Gardens (nee Potter), gets married, one of the wedding guests is J.C. Salley's father, a Columbia University professor, commits an unacknowledged theft from a Cheever short story when commenting on his older brother...
What is wrong with this picture? Not quite enough to work up a lather over Salley's alleged miseries. Because Salley tells her own story, it is impossible to say how seriously Cheever wants her to be taken. The only real point of suspense in the book is a foregone conclusion: when the right job comes along, Salley gets...
...problems begin with the choice of material. Cheever's best stories are not merely chronicles of upper-middle-class life, but Kafkaesque tragedies about what happens when a rigorously ordered world starts to go mad. Instead of dramatizing tales from the two major Cheever story collections, The Enormous Radio and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, PBS has selected trifles from The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. These are then stretched out to fill an hour each...
...other two shows also flatten Cheever's subtleties into middle-brow platitudes. In O Youth and Beauty!, Michael Murphy plays a onetime Princeton track star, now a bank executive, who vexes his wife (Kathryn Walker) by jumping over furniture at cocktail parties. Not content to let this conceit speak for it self, Playwright Gurney supplies dialogue to explain that the hero is "surmounting the obstacles of middle age . . . [by] leaping above the paraphernalia of middle-class life." In The Five-Forty-Eight, a dance of death between a married man (Laurence Luckinbill) and his jilted lover (Mary Beth Hurt...