After diving into the full suburban manic John Cheever with “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”, it should be fun to talk about early John Cheever. Early John Cheever could be a mixed bag. He lived in a New York City luxury apartment and wrote in the basement. Many of his stories were “clever and well-written” and pretty much indistinguishable from Updike or Salinger. However, he was also playing around with the form and using multiple character perspectives as well as cruel satire.
With “O City of Broken Dreams,” there’s a wonderful sense of the ridiculous as everyone is trying to break into the big time of writers and agents and literary parties. It’s also a bit nasty as John Cheever had made it. He was publishing in The New Yorker. Agents wanted to turn his books and stories into television shows. He could drink all he wanted. He wasn’t going to get fired. It’d be decades before day drinking would prove dangerous.
Another way to see it is a wry take on the ways that the dreams of fame and fortune makes us foolish. Even the characters who are obviously frauds are clueless.
“The Hartleys” is the kind of story that you see in a Creative Writing class. It’s all about the shock ending and the late hour reveal where Cheever has the wife drunkenly sobbing about how the whole ski trip is a terrible idea. They just can’t recapture the magic. Then the daughter dies because shock endings are popular.
Finally, we have “The Sutton Place Story” which is a fun messy story about fun messy people. In this case, Cheever was writing about his crowd - the wealthy and the foolish - with multiple characters all coming up to take center stage and then ceding the spotlight to someone else. This is a difficult feat in a novel, but in a short story it’s even more impressive.
Also note that two of these stories are about bad parents. John Cheever had just become a father. Cheever seems to be working through some self-doubt in that regard.
Ok. That’s it for this week. I’m still working on the first story for BADASS HORROR (buy a copy. Read along). It’s “Pool Sharks” by Gerard Brennan (who also wrote Belfast Noir). It’s a brutal noir tale of violence and evil. I quite love it.
Here’s an audio recording of a collection of John Cheever stories, if you’re interested.
Some day, I will make enough money from jobs, grants, subscriptions, I won’t have to ask for money. Or work. Until then, please help me pay my rent.
Wow this came at a perfect time, have been bouncing through his collection the last few weeks. Sutton Place is one of my favorites