This is not one of the John Cheever stories that you love and recommend to friends. This is the kind of story that John Cheever that seems like a quintessential John Cheever story if you’ve only heard Cheever’s name. It could also be a John Updike story or a Paul Auster story or a story by any of the dozens of the white guys writing about white guy angst and the frustration of never getting what you want.
None of the characters are satisfied by the end of this story. None of the characters are satisfied at the beginning of the story. Jim, the closest this story has to a main character, wanders through it like a sleepwalker. Mrs. Garrison, the mother-in-law, hates the purple flowers. Nils, the gardener, hates being ordered to move the lilies. Agnes Shay is taking care of Jim's niece and loves her like a mother, but the niece gets taken away by the end. Jim's wife is crushed because Jim won't go for her land investment scheme. No one is happy.
The story structure is Neo-Classical with everything happening on one day, but unlike the Neo-Classical plays, nothing really happens. There's no inciting incident or rising action. Jim wakes up at the beginning of the story and goes to bed at the end. Most Creative Writing teachers order their students to never start a story with a character waking up, so the actual novelty of a character waking up is hard to miss.
There are many reasons why “Jim woke up” shouldn't work. It starts the story too early. Readers want to see the character engaged in action, not waking up and brushing their teeth and looking in the mirror for three pages before the character decides to kill their wife or fight a dragon. It's low energy. It doesn't grab the reader's attention. It's too easy.
It works in this story because the point of the story is to watch these character over a day. Now, it's not confined to a day. There are memories and information given throughout that rely on flashbacks and exposition. However, the characters are mostly going about their day. Jim wakes up, talks to the gardener, does other things. The action switches to Agnes and Carlotta because Jim is setting traps and brandishing a gun. Agnes doesn't like these developments.
The perspective switch is actually unusually for Cheever. Most Cheever stories stay with one character and keep the reader in that character's head throughout. In this one, Agnes is now the main character and her entire devotion to the girl that she takes care of is rendered tragic by a later revelation that the girl's mother wants her to come to New York once the divorce is finalized.
Everyone gets a scene to show just how miserable they are. Nils, the gardener, stands up for himself and just as he accuses Mrs. Garrison of killing his wife, Jim tells Nils to shut up. And that's it for Nils. Jim also ruins his wife's dreams and by the end of the story, Jim kills a raccoon caught in a trap.
Without even realizing it, Jim just makes everyone miserable. Since this is WASP country, no one blames him. Even his most egregious offense against decorum is covered up with a well-placed lie about the dead raccoon going on a nice trip.
This story did not impress me when I first read it. While I do see more value in it now - due to the perspective shifting and the multiple stories - I'm still not in love with it. Cheever would write about upper class white people engaged in quiet desperation and disappointment his entire career, but his later stories would get much weirder. This 1947 story is one of the most conventional stories. It follows neo-classical rules by taking place in one day and ends with a slightly ambiguous victory for the protagonist. It doesn't play with time or innovative story telling. It's fine. It's just fine.
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Edmund White wrote about John Cheever here.