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Loading... The Stories of John Cheever (original 1978; edition 2000)by John Cheever (Author)
Work InformationThe Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1978)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. For the most part, the stories in this collection are character studies of individuals facing a moral dilemma or a psychological crisis, and they left this reader feeling unsettled. They make you wonder what is going on underneath the surface presented by strangers and casual acquaintances, and maybe even one’s close friends. The stories seem to be a product of their time, written over the decades of the mid-20th century from post-World War II through the mid- to late 1970s. In a way, they seem like the literary equivalent of mid-20th century television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Many of the stories evoke the same kind of atmosphere as these television shows. ( ) 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.
So look closely at his pages, no matter if you’re studying my tattered version, or if you have a clean copy in hand. Look at the perspectives—cockeyed but exacting. Look at the characters—messy and mesmerizing. Look at the sentences— they’re full of scribbled stars. ...There are colder, less hospitable places, of course. The tricks memory plays are usually flattering. But one of the surprises to be found in The Stories of John Cheever is that the stories are almost always better than people remember. Never before has it been possible to see so much of his short work so steadily and so whole. Never before has the received notion of a "typical" Cheever story—a satire on suburbia, based on fading Protestant morality —seemed further from the more complex and entertaining truth. This massive retrospective of 61 stories (selected by Cheever) is not only splendid from beginning to end paper; it charts one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary letters... Is contained inContainsHas the adaptationIs abridged inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, it has become a classic. Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection. Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."--Publisher's description. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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