The Stories of John Cheever

I recently finished slogging through The Stories of John Cheever. It wasn't so much the length of the book (693 pages) that caused me difficulty, it was the compartmentalization inherent in any collection of short stories -- finishing each story feels like a small victory, rather than motivation to begin the next story. Due to this feeling (lack of page turnering?), I read at least four books concurrently with this collection; alternating one or two short stories with chapters or sections in my other books. As with any short story collection (and certainly moreso for one encompassing an entire career) there's a non-zero amount of chaff here, but at least Cheever's chaff is worth reading once at a minimum. Unlike many retrospective collections, where the first few stories feature the writer struggling and grasping to find his voice, this anthology opens with "Goodbye, My Brother", as excellent a piece of fiction as any collected herein. Other highlights include "O Youth and Beauty!", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin", and of course, "The Swimmer", which comes highly recommended -- every review I've seen of this collection mentions it as a gem, and I have to agree. While at first it was tough to grasp a metaphor after so many straightforward stories, the symbolism shines through in the end. (Cheever does love his Greek mythology, with that takeoff of Narcissus, the title of the later story "Artemis the Honest Well Digger", as well as "Metamorphoses", which is four vignettes that are all overt modern reproductions of Greek myth).

As for his characters, Cheever creates an endless series of WASPs who smoke, drink, womanize, and generally are not particularly deep, although they always seem to manage to find those who are louder, dumber, or more boorish to be embarrassed by. That's not to say that the characters are impossible to relate to, since we are all imperfect. Overall, it's a collection worth browsing, of a bygone generation -- I'll let Cheever's words from the preface close it out:

"These stories," writes Cheever in the preface to this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, "seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' set sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."