Word: cheevers
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This stroke is audacious and illuminating. What is a fairy-tale line doing in a story filled with accidents and misfortunes? It is alerting everyone to the presence of magic that was there all along, dogging the hero but also yanking him out of the rut of predictability. Cheever does not often introduce direct trappings of the supernatural; The Enormous Radio and The Swimmer violate physical laws, and a woman in The Music Teacher acts suspiciously like a real witch. But an aura of wonder bathes even those stories most absorbed in everyday details...
This radiance is Cheever's unique achievement. It does not stem from easy optimism, as some have charged. For every story in this collection with an up beat ending there is one that puts ice at the back of the neck. Black magic is here, as well as the redemptive kind, and in explicable happiness can be every bit as astonishing as inexplicable misery. Cheever has never tried more or less than to get this sense of mystery down. At the end of one story, he wonders how mere fiction could "hope to celebrate a world that lies spread...
Once upon a time, John Cheever fled the country when one of his books was due for publication. Now he is staying put, cheerfully weathering the appearance of The Stories of John Cheever in the old house in Ossining, N.Y., an hour's commute north of Manhattan, where he moved with his wife Mary, two sons and daughter some 18 years ago. "I don't get much pleasure from reading my own work," says Cheever, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another. "I'd like to rewrite all the novels." Going over his short stories, though, turned...
...Cheever's own story has had some harrowing moments, but the hero seems to have come through handsomely. After a serious heart attack five years ago, he underwent a rigorous cure for alcoholism. He speaks candidly of the downward spiral his life had taken and of the connection between writing and drinking. "If you are an artist," he says, "self-destruction is quite expected of you. Orphic myths popped up early, showing singers being torn apart by Harpies to the infinite satisfaction of society. The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes...
...floor dining room where he sits, the weather is Cheeverian, all high sky and searching sunlight. The author finishes a glass of iced tea and stands up, instantly alerting Edgar and Bathsheba, two adoring golden retrievers. An afternoon walk in the nearby woods is part of the daily routine. Cheever confines his writing-on "a long book"-to the mornings. He recently finished an original 90-minute play for public television, but fends off invitations to dramatize his stories for the home screen. "You can't adapt a story any more than you can adapt a baseball game...