I only checked out this book so I could read the story "The Swimmer," that they made into a movie, starring Burt Lancaster, in 1968. I skipped several of the stories towards the end. All I can think is that John Cheever hung around some of the creepiest humans, because that's who people his stories. He's extremely misogynistic, and he must have had some Kind of real strong connection in the publishing business, because he is a mediocre author. Here's some samplings of his strange wordings:

He dressed his deaf wife in salt bags and potato sacks. He was miserly. He was bitter.

Red-headed, deep-breasted, slender, and indolent, she seemed to belong to a different species

He heard people say that she was beautiful and stupid.

She was queer, Chester thought, she was as queer as the Chinese language.

with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets, their gold jewelry and their dregs of Je Reviens and Chanel.

She was a pretty woman with that striking pallor you so often find in nymphomaniacs

Perhaps she was frigid—but hardly, with that pallor.

When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate young woman is unfathomable.


His chair creaked, and by bulging his muscles a little he made his garters, braces, and shoes all sound.

It got so bad that we had to give him the works. We asked him up to Pete Fenton’s room for a cup of cocoa, roughed him up, threw his clothes out the window, painted his rear end with iodine, and stuck his head in a pail of water until he damned near drowned

It was his life, his boat, and, like every other man, he was made to be the father of thousands,

When he finally did marry, he picked a woman much younger than he—a sweet-tempered girl with red hair and green eyes. She sometimes called him Daddy.

The secretary was a hard-faced blonde, and the businesswoman was herself a figure of such astonishing unsavoriness—you might say evil—that no one spoke to her, not even the waiters. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes were made up to look like the eyes of a viper, her voice was guttural, and whatever her business was, it had stripped her of any appeal as a human being.

I have never seen such a relationship as that between Brimmer and the businesswoman that was not based on bitterness, irresolution, and cowardice—the very opposites of love—and any such indulgence on my part would, I was sure, turn my hair white in a moment, destroy the pigmentation in my eyes, incline me to simper, and leave a hairy tail coiled in my pants.


I am a native and I was wearing buckskin jump boots, chino pants cut so tight that my sexual organs were discernible, and a rayon-acetate pajama top printed with representations of the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa María in full sail.

Update: I read a bit of Cheever's biography, and found out that he was bisexual, but was always hiding it. That he had a loathing of that side of him. So it makes more sense now, why all his stories show such loathsome sides to his characters: it was his dark mirror. ( )

Quite good. ( )

I can not give this collection higher praise. John Cheever is often taught in creative writing classes--his famous 1-page story "Reunion" a potent example of concise storytelling. Also well known are "The Enormous Radio" and "The Swimmer."

This collection includes those, and more. Some of the best finds are "Goodbye, My Brother," "Torch Song," "The Season of Divorce," "The Children," "Montraldo," and "The Fourth Alarm."

There are also failures in this collection, but Cheever writes with such sincerity that one never doubts his intentions. There is a kind of modesty to Cheever's writing--an assurance that he is only seeking those timeless human moments--that one easily forgives his more overwrought constructions. ( )

One of the masters of the short story. His chronicles of life in upscale suburbia are shattering, elegant, and still ring true. ( )