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Loading... The Stories of John Cheever
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I originally bought this book so that I could find a story in it for my 10th grade honors students. We were working on a standard which asks students to compare several stories by one author. After that, I read all of the stories, and was not altogether impressed. His writing gets a bit repetetive because the settings, neighborhoods, problems, and even characters' names don't change much. Several stories were fairly good, but the collection is really a product of a bygone era, to which I had difficulty relating. The stories don't seem all that timeless. (  ) silva_44 | Feb 2, 2009 |  Picked this up at a half-price sale at a large chain bookstore in Tokyo as a kind of warm up to going home (New York / New England - ground well covered in this book) and was pleasantly caught off guard by how hooked I got on these stories. I've never been a short story lover, but I find that over time I've come to really appreciate the form and this collection is a wonderful collection of them. Not all of them worked for me (the ones set in Italy, by and large), but most of them were good or great and the whole collection are certainly worth the time. And give them time! This isn't something to be read quickly... (  ) cwc790411 | Dec 4, 2008 | 1653 The Stories of John Cheever (read 17 Aug 1981) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1979) (National Book Award fiction prize in 1981) (National Book Critics Circle fiction award for 1978) There are 61 short "stories" in this book, which I read only because I read all Pulitzer fiction winners. I am sure glad to be done with this book. I hate reading short story collections anyway--it is like starting a new book every half hour or so--but this book is awful. Boring, boring, boring. People I despised, people so stupid and living lives so alien and repulsive to me! The rich suburban commuter--drinking, adultery, all so matter of fact, as if human beings cannot help but behaving like moronic animals. To make things worse, towards the end the stories become obscene. I don't believe I'll ever read any more John Cheever. He has nothing to say to me. (  ) Schmerguls | Nov 21, 2008 | The Stories of John Cheever, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1978 and the Pulitzer in 1979, is a chronological collection that spans Cheever’s short story career, from pre-WWII up to 1973. To read this collection – just shy of 700 pages – is to live in Cheever’s head, tracking his artistic and personal development in a way that a single novel or volume of stories doesn’t allow. These are not happy stories. The earlier pieces are particularly bleak and raw. While the later stories are deeper and more nuanced, they are still pretty dark. Precious few have cheerful resolutions. The best Cheever’s characters seem to achieve is contentment despite imperfect circumstances. Cheever’s is a world of commuter trains and cocktail parties, where everyone wears hats, has a cook, drinks martinis at lunch, summers, sails, and commits adultery. Not everyone is rich; in fact, money problems are a continuing theme. But the trappings, however tarnished, of a mid-century, Northeast corridor, upper crust way of life hang on all the stories. And that is Cheever at his best. He can bring us so deep into that world that it feels like living it. ( ) ggchickapee | Mar 24, 2008 | My review is based solely around The Swimmer, but this story alone is sorth buying this book. He sets the story up perfectly and beautifully, and brings it to an end that Franz Kafka would admire. (  ) jruthe2 | Feb 9, 2007 | 
 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.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375724427, Paperback)Think of John Cheever's fiction, and a whole world springs to mind--a world of leafy suburbs, summer houses, commuter trains, boarding schools, and inevitably, his own chosen territory, the cocktail hour among WASPs. But it's a mistake to approach Cheever as if he were merely some sort of anthropologist documenting the customs of an obscure and vanishing tribe. Nostalgia and class issues aside, his true subject is the darkness hidden beneath the surface of postwar American life. A case in point is his famous story "The Swimmer," in which an ebullient Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the backyard pools of his neighbors. In the course of his journey, however, summer gives way to autumn, his neighbors turn against him, there are troubling intimations of disgrace and financial ruin, and he arrives to find his house both locked and empty.Though these stories deal with bright, prosperous, ostensibly happy people, a cold wind blows through them. Age, illness, financial embarrassment, sex, alcohol, death--all of these threaten his suburban Eden. (Is it himself Cheever is mocking in his ironic "The Worm in the Apple"? "Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?") Inanimate objects carry the residue of their past owners' unhappiness and cruelty ("Seaside Houses," "The Lowboy"); expatriates long for but cannot quite find their way home ("The Woman Without A Country," "Boy in Rome"); children vanish or turn out badly (too many stories to count). All of this is conveyed in prose both graceful and tender. No one is better than Cheever at describing a character's appearance: "He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream." Given his uncanny eye (and ear) for realistic description, it's easy to forget how experimental Cheever could be. His later stories pioneered authorial intrusions in the best postmodern style, and from the beginning, he wrote what would much later be called magical realism. (Think of the sinister broadcasts in "The Enormous Radio," or the phantom love interest in "The Chimera.") A literary event at its publication and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever remains a stunning and enormously influential book. --Mary Park (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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