I read this collection of stories in a rather fragmented manner over a span of one and a half years. And I'm truly glad that I did it that way.

If I had attempted to read it straight through, I might have easily grown tired of Cheever, or at least of his recurrent theme which delves into the hidden heartaches of the upper middle class in suburbia.

I first picked up this book when I was just 19 years old. I can vividly remember reading it on a bus journey to Cape Cod. However, at that time, I wasn't emotionally prepared to fully understand and appreciate it.

During this recent reading, I have developed a profound appreciation and respect for Cheever's elegant prose style. His depictions of neurotic, painful conflicts have the force and inevitability of natural events.

Cheever's art wasn't a happy one. But it would be an oversimplification to say that it was only about the unhappiness of the well-to-do. He wrote about the private sadnesses that people carefully hide away while still maintaining a façade of normalcy.

He also explored the pain that stems from human weakness, yet he offered no solutions. Many of his characters are tormented by failures in love, the process of aging, and corrosive personal flaws.

This was often somewhat chilling. But still, after a regular day filled with false good cheer, I frequently found myself eagerly looking forward to reading another Cheever story.

The crushing pressures of society are clearly evident in the lives of his characters. Paradoxically, though, Cheever was no social critic. He had a partiality for a fairly smug, narrow propriety.

This attitude, despite the damage it causes, he often depicts as being ultimately the correct one. This, of course, was at odds with the real man he was: an alcoholic, adulterous bisexual who managed to balance his superficially normal home life with a hidden life of excessive drinking and gay affairs.

It's hard not to view him as somewhat hypocritical. But in his defense, one can point out a couple of things. He did seem to believe in bourgeois values, although he didn't live up to them.

This must have been a source of great conflict for him. Also, if he had written pieces about men having anal sex in bars on Christopher Street, he would not have achieved anywhere near the success that he did.

The earlier stories in this collection are more the standard WASP dramas and contain some of his finest writing. As his career advanced, he experimented with more unusual styles.

There are some dreamlike, surreal moments, oddly formless pieces, a series of tales about Americans living in Italy (which weren't his best - his true strength lay in writing about his home turf), and even a couple of light-hearted, humorous tales.

His best stories skillfully blend elements of a resonant and disturbing strangeness with the ordinary stuff of everyday life. "The Swimmer", "The 5:48", and "The Music Teacher" are excellent examples of this.

Some have criticized Cheever for working with stock situations and flat characters that don't develop. In my view, the situations are all distinct, even if they share similar elements.

For instance, a troubled marriage, someone with a drinking problem, or someone behaving in a socially unacceptable way. It's true that the characters are flat. But these are short stories, and character development isn't an absolute requirement.

If the situation is interesting and the writing manages to keep the reader engaged, that's sufficient. At its worst, Cheever's work can come across as a series of meandering passages where little of interest occurs either externally or internally, except for the occasional oddly unpleasant encounter.

He had a lasting interest in strange misunderstandings and the hurtful things that people are capable of doing to one another. At his best, however, he wrote graceful, melancholic examinations of America's hopes and frailties.

These stories predominantly center around individuals who are rather unpleasant, yet somehow manage to uphold the façade of being decent people.

Eventually, their overconfidence leads to their exposure. And then all the neighbors engage in gossip about them, as it's more convenient to focus on those who have been caught rather than worry about one's own flaws being discovered.

So, the question arises: why am I awarding five stars to a collection of stories about mostly unlikable people? The answer lies in the fact that John Cheever is an exceptional writer. He takes common emotions, desires, and behaviors and presents them in an absurd manner, making them extremely recognizable.

Of course, you wouldn't recognize these traits in yourself because you are a wonderful person. But there are indeed people all around you who strive to appear more successful than they truly are and who are hiding some not-so-nice secrets.

It's important to note that not all the stories follow the same pattern. Some are heartwarming, and some are humorous. Cheever has a unique talent for ending stories in the most unexpected ways. It's like sitting on a bee without any protection. You're enjoying the story, completely unaware of what's coming.

And then suddenly, you get stung. However, the sting doesn't linger for long. Instead, it makes you eager to read the next story to see where it will lead.

Overall, despite the unappealing nature of some of the characters, John Cheever's writing skills make this collection a must-read.

This book commences with a man who nearly takes the life of his brother, predominantly due to a profound misunderstanding. It concludes with a wife who poisons her husband and manages to evade consequences. Cheever writes in a manner similar to an entomologist. His characters are like beetles and butterflies that he impales with a pin and then fastens to the page. However, Cheever doesn't appear to hold any affection for his "bugs." Instead, if he feels anything for them at all, it leans towards despising them. Frequently, when they aren't preoccupied with contemplating the act of killing one another as retribution for the banalities of life, he does them the "favor" and eliminates them himself.

All of this occurs within a rather ordinary world, mainly in a triangle spanning from Manhattan and its suburbs, to Nantucket, and then to Rome. Regardless of what else is happening, each story will surely feature its share of highballs and martinis. Everyone seems so ordinary (or ordinary for the middle of the last century, when people had cocktail parties instead of Facebook). And that is the most terrifying aspect about the repulsiveness of these characters. I was acquainted with them. I grew up in a New York suburb. My parents attended cocktail parties, and I recognize at least some of the outward trappings of these stories. But the inner world presented here seems alien to me, and it is definitely one that I prefer to encounter in fiction rather than in real life.

The writing is straightforward and elegant, with some breathtaking flights of imagination. As he grew older, he also seems to have developed a hatred for story structure as intense as his dislike for his characters. So, he begins to experiment with that as well, casting doubts无处不在. By the end, he seems to be dividing some stories between "facts" and questions that he poses but does not explicitly answer. And these self-referential forays tend to be effective. The stories remain captivating, and they are always well-written. Some of the stories are truly beautiful, and I'm glad I read them. I'm not certain whether I liked them enough to progress to one of his novels. I suppose it will depend on whether I'm in the mood for gin, sweating glasses by the pool, casual adultery, and spite.

Page 489 / “The Seaside Houses”

“The Seaside Houses” presents a profound exploration of human nature and the human condition. The questions posed, such as “Are we truly this close to one another? Must we impose our burdens on strangers? And is our sense of the universality of suffering so inescapable?” encapsulate the essence of the Cheever struggle. It's a complex web of emotions and dilemmas that he weaves throughout his works.

2016 is the year of rediscovering the books that were loved in one's twenties. For the author, it's a journey back in time, trying to recall and relive the experiences of reading those books. Cheever's stories were among the first to be encountered upon arriving in the Bay Area around late 1992.
As the rereading progresses, the author finds himself even more deeply moved and impressed by Cheever's work. There's an argument to be made that the melancholy existentialism of “Mad Men” owes a great deal to these stories. However, Cheever's stories possess a greater sense of humanity. Whether he's inhabiting the voice of a lowly Park Avenue elevator operator or the archetypal suburban man in a flannel suit, he brings a depth and authenticity to the characters.
While some of the stories' settings may seem a bit dated and old-fashioned, the issues that the characters grapple with, such as class, love, and life's purpose, remain as relevant as ever. Cheever's masterful eye for detail elevates the mundane to the sublime. His descriptions paint a vivid picture of the world he creates. Although the old white WASP author and his stories of privileged Northeasterners may not be in vogue today, the emotional struggles that are delicately and acutely rendered in these stories are timeless.

They speak to the core of what it means to be human and continue to resonate with readers, regardless of the passage of time.

I had the extraordinary opportunity to read an amazing collection of stories during my hospitalization and subsequent medical leave.

Cheever delves deep into the world of the American middle class in the forties, fifties, and sixties. The social, family, and work environments are described with a remarkable clinical eye, revealing the impulses and tensions of the human psyche amidst the routines and conventions of a world filled with lights and shadows, calms and tempests, perturbations and epiphanies.

Cheever is a writer who reveals, satirizes, destabilizes, surprises, and questions. It is a pleasure to read these stories. Literature that does not subordinate itself to ideologies, theories, or programs. An essential book of contemporary narrative.

This collection offers a profound and engaging exploration of the human condition, presenting a vivid portrait of a bygone era while still remaining relevant today. It is a must-read for anyone interested in literature and the human experience.

I read The Swimmer in my American Literature class a few years back. It was a truly captivating piece of work.

Unfortunately, it's a shame that this wonderful story isn't available on audio book. I would have loved to listen to it while on the go.

I will definitely provide a more detailed review when I get the chance. I really appreciate that a lot of the author's stories, like The Swimmer, portray family dynamics quite well.

It gives readers a deep and accurate understanding of the complex relationships within a family. The characters are so vividly described that you can almost feel as if you know them personally.

I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts and insights about this story with others in a more comprehensive review.

John Cheever is widely renowned as a colossal figure in post-war American fiction, with an enormous reputation.

His works are enveloped in a particular social atmosphere. His male characters mix drinks and commute to New York every weekday morning on the eight-four, while his female characters don furs and suffer from quiet, desperate, and even suicidally boring lives. Everyone plays tennis at the club, and the sea is never too distant.

To a large extent, these descriptions hold true when one reads the actual stories. However, there is a surprising aspect that they are not just that, or not all that Cheever is capable of. He can and does write about poverty, as seen in "Christmas Is a Sad Season For the Poor," which features an apartment building elevator operator. He spends the entire Christmas morning telling everyone in the elevator how depressing and lonely his day will likely be. This succeeds in evoking Christian charity in the hearts of almost all the families in the building, resulting in seventeen hot dinners and mountains of presents. Unable to distribute them all to his children, he gives most of this bounty to his neighbor, who then rouses herself and her family to take them to an even poorer family. The moral of this story, or even whether there is a moral at all, is unclear. I think the point here is less about any particular moral and more about an overwhelming sense of irony, perhaps even of futility, not just in this context but of all human endeavor.

He can also write about adultery and cruelty. In Cheever's world, it is mostly wives who are abusive to their husbands. Every now and then, as in "The Music Teacher," the position is reversed, but Cheever never seems to side with patriarchy at the expense of justice. He rarely takes sides at all, but generally reserves tenderness for those characters who are baffled, vulnerable, or weak, regardless of gender. Many of his stories revolve around a man who has a mistress. None of his first-person narrators are women, although he writes some stories in the omniscient third person that focus on female perspectives. He was a closeted bisexual, which, while not the only lens through which to view his dissection of middle- and upper-class American sexual mores, is an interesting one. He is frank and fascinated by the hypocrisy of family values, the liberating effect of post-war European travel, and the terrible anxiety about mortality and obsolescence that adultery attempts to assuage in this world.

Philip Roth is quoted on the back of my edition as saying that Cheever writes "enchanted realism." It is an interesting expression as it explicitly repudiates the implications of how I would describe it, which is a kind of materialist fabulism or fantasia. Frequently, at the end of these stories, miraculous or inexplicable things occur; time shifts and blurs; people appear and disappear. There is a sense of the uncanny throughout. This is perhaps most famously manifested in the late story "The Swimmer," where the protagonist Ned Merrill decides to swim home from a party by using the pools of all the neighbors between the two houses. When he returns home, he discovers that he has aged by decades, his fortune has vanished, his house is shuttered and empty, and his family is gone. But there is also that hint of eeriness in earlier works, such as "The Sutton Place Story," which revolves around a missing little girl. When she is eventually found, she mentions a mysterious lady who gave her bread but is either unwilling or unable to say more. I think it is a story about the moment when one first realizes that a child is not an extension of oneself, a realization that hits the little girl's parents especially hard precisely because they have been so neglectful of her.

Most significantly, Cheever's writing is simply beautiful. He can write a sentence as simple and declarative as Hemingway, or spin out a string of subordinate clauses as lush and proliferating as (though more dexterous than) anything by Henry James. He is both profound and superficial at the same time; he can capture frivolity and desperation in the same breath and follow it up with genuine, foolish, heart-felt love. And his work is suffused, for me, with this sense of light: suburban light, golden light, American light. I have long wanted to read his Journals, and based on the strength of the short stories, his novels are also about to be added to my TBR list. Marvelous.

The American middle class in the fifties and sixties, their fears, their passions, their hatreds, their loves... Portraits with an impeccable style of a cocktail, pool and tennis society where boredom and novelty daily divide successes and failures equally.

This was a time when the American middle class was striving for a certain lifestyle. They gathered at cocktail parties, lounged by the pool, and played tennis. But beneath the表面的glamour, there were hidden fears and insecurities.

Their passions drove them to seek new experiences and pursue their dreams, while their hatreds often stemmed from the pressures and expectations of society. And their loves, whether for a person or a particular activity, gave meaning to their lives.

Welcome to the Cheever corner, where we can explore this fascinating world and gain a deeper understanding of the American middle class during this era.

**The Lucinda River**

The Lucinda River is a collection of short stories that together form a single, grand narrative. It tells the tales of bourgeois families, sometimes wealthy upper-class families and sometimes more modest ones, who travel by train. There are many trains, those of the commuters. But it is also the story of more humble characters, servants, cooks, elevator operators. Families are always celebrating with neighbors and friends. However, behind the scenes, in their private lives, husbands and wives are often in crisis, often betrayed, abandoned, or divorced. Or they live in fear that their beautiful family picture will be disrupted.

It is a story of personal failures, of falls and rises, of regrets and remorses, of real and irreversible dramas. It is the story of the curse and consolation of alcohol, of the consolation and impulse of sex, of the weight of the complexity, disorder, and dirtiness of life. Of the water that heals when we immerse ourselves in it or with the sound when it rains.

There is also a lot of Italy (and we will see the Cheever of Sorrentino in Parthenope). "The Swimmer" stands out among all, and among the others, some of my favorites are: An Extraordinary Radio, The Five Forty-Eight Express, Reunion, Percy, The Brigadier General and the Golf Widow, The Geometry of Love, The Thief of Shady Hill, The Hartleys, Artemis the Honest Well Digger, Boy in Rome, Therapy, a Miscellany of Characters Who Will Not Appear.

The images accompanying the text, such as those by Edward Hopper, add another layer of depth and atmosphere to the stories. They capture the essence of the characters and their situations, enhancing the reader's understanding and emotional connection. The quotes from the stories further illustrate the themes and emotions explored, inviting the reader to delve deeper into the world of the Lucinda River.

Overall, the Lucinda River is a rich and engaging collection that offers a profound exploration of the human condition.

This is kind of a cheater review since I didn’t finish the book (this may happen at some point, though it will not be in the immediate future). However, not finishing it left me with a few things to say, so here we are.

First and foremost, I have to state that I didn’t stop reading because I don’t like the writing. Cheever has an amazing ability to depict characters who are content within their discontent, and I was pleasantly surprised by his sense of humor. I didn’t mark many quotes, but here are two just for kicks:

“When you get to be as old as me, that’s the only way you can meet people—automobile accidents, fires, things like that.”

“’I don’t mind you looking in my windows at night, Mr. Marston,’ I was going to say, in a voice loud enough to embarrass him, ‘but I wish that you wouldn’t trample on my wife’s flowers.’”

Most of his humor has a dark edge to it, a sarcastic bitterness that suits his characters perfectly. Several of the stories I got through rely on this humor for their full impact. “The Superintendent,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” and “The Five-Forty-Eight” all come to mind. Although the latter is definitely darker, in some ways the darkest and saddest one I read here, and I’m not entirely sure it was supposed to be amusing.

The whole humor bit was just a tangent, so it’s time to get back on track. Cheever’s characters, at both their best and their worst, are dynamic, catty, charming, and quite a bit of fun to read. I have no quotes for this because I’m not good at remembering them, but you should trust me. Seriously.

But here’s the thing. It turns out I can only handle so many pages (262 to be exact) of stories that detail the intricacies and intrigues of upper middle class families summering on the Atlantic coast. This is a generalization, yes, but not an unfair one. The stories start to feel familiar, as if we’re going through encounters with the same characters over and over again, just with different names to distinguish them. This might be okay if the stories are read separately with time and other stories in between, but when read back to back in a collection like this, the similarities in setting, characters, and conflicts make it difficult for any of them to stand out. “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Swimmer” still hold up well (after deciding not to finish the book this time, I skipped ahead to “The Swimmer” to see if I still liked it as much as I did years ago when I first read it, and I was relieved to find that I do). Some of the funnier or darker ones manage to gain some traction, but too many of them don’t.

Overall, while Cheever’s writing has its strengths, the sameness of the stories in this collection made it a bit of a slog for me after a while. I may come back to it at some point in the future and give it another try, but for now, I’m moving on to something else.

Short fiction is indeed a challenging genre, not just for writers but also for readers.

Entering a new story-world is akin to lowering oneself into cold water. It feels uncomfortable and requires effort. With a novel, one only has to do this once and can be transported for hours, days, or even weeks. However, with a short story, that time is significantly more limited. One must settle for a sense of exhilaration, a thrill of pleasure or dread, or at least a somewhat altered perspective on one's day. Most people are reluctant to take the plunge.

I have a passion for short stories, but even with the very best of them, I often find myself having to hold my nose to swallow the "healthy medicine." This holds true even for the great masters of the form, such as Hemingway, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, or Flannery O'Connor. So, when the seven-hundred-page "brick" of The Stories of John Cheever landed on my bedside bureau, I regarded it with some trepidation. I thought I would just sample it, read a few stories to familiarize myself with the work of this famous mid-twentieth-century American writer. I planned to keep it in the stack for a few months and dip in and out.

Well, that's not how things turned out. I devoured the book from cover to cover, which means, I believe, that I have now read just about every piece of short fiction in Mr. Cheever's oeuvre. And I'm here to tell you: it's an outstanding oeuvre.

For the full review, click here: http://bit.ly/Kmj7R8

John Cheever's short stories are like a sharp scalpel, meticulously peeling away at the decay that lies beneath the seemingly perfect facade of American suburbia.

The dreams, desires, and the countless small victories and defeats that punctuate everyday life come together to form a collection of stories that is both bittersweet and powerfully poignant. Among them, while "The Swimmer" is undoubtedly a great piece, I don't think it's the best.

What truly stands out is Cheever's remarkable ability to shine a light on the hidden cracks and flaws that exist just beneath our polished surfaces. His characters are not just fictional entities; they are vividly human and deeply humane, with all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes, and fears.

Reading John Cheever's short stories is like taking a journey into the heart of the American suburban experience, and it's a journey that is well worth taking. It's a good read that will leave you思考 and reflecting long after you've turned the final page.