John Cheever Gets Weird(er)

Three More Stories - Bacchus Shows Up

In Parthenope, John Cheever shows up to drink his way through Italy and encounter a woman who symbolizes Italian goddesses. This fits more with Cheever’s themes than one might think. By the 1960s, John Cheever would subtly place deities in his stories as he explored the themes of mortals encountering the divine and falling apart.

But before that one there was “The Country Husband”, a story of a man working his way through a suburban existence even as the women seem obsessed with driving him insane. The title is a reference to a Restoration play where everyone is fucking. No one is fucking in this story but there is a horny desperation.

The next story in the collection is “The Duchess”, a semi-biographical sketch of Cheever’s Italian landlady. She was an interesting character in her own right and her children are even more crazy as they fight over her artwork. However, this story hits all the beats of her life including her father’s resistance to Mussolini, her mother being a nurse, the fact that she waited until after her parents died to marry a commoner. It’s an odd one.

And finally we have “The Scarlet Moving Van”, a story where a man has to deal with Bacchus moving in next door. When you have a love of drinking, the god of wine showing up next door and tearing into your life is a bad sign. This is one of the first ones where Cheever explored Greek mythology rubbing up against suburban life. It wouldn’t be the last.

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Parthenope is on HBO Max.

Check out the first Dybbuk Press book Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre.