John Cheever, Master of Traps

A quick Google search informs me that John Cheever’s most popular nickname, more popular than “The Cheevinator” or even “CheevDawg 3000,” is actually “The Chekhov of the Suburbs.” To anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading Cheever’s dazzling tales of affluent American despair, this nickname will make a great deal of sense. Cheever’s best stories, like Chekhov’s, are tight contraptions that somehow defy their own brevity, often fitting near-unconscionable heights and depths - entire human dramas in miniature - into a single paragraph. Cheever then gathers these paragraphs into mysterious entireties, stories that tend to indulge in our rawest emotions while remaining beguiling in their total effect. Without knowing too much about Cheever’s personal life (besides the most salient and notorious plot points), I picture him, through the prism of his work, as a marvelous gadabout, a man with an immense appetite for pleasure, not the least of which was the pleasure of spinning a good yarn. And spin he did.

Cheever by a train, presumably filled with drunk suburbanites

As I read my badly tattered copy of The Stories of John Cheever, I am most entertained by Cheever’s ability to conjure a complete character in mere sentences. Who else can draw a man so fully in so few lines? Take, for instance, this description of Herbert McGrath, a minor but oddly expansive character from “Just Tell Me Who It Was”:  

“Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension - a nightmare - that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train.”

Here we have a simple enough character, the kind of stuffy suburbanite we often encounter in Cheever’s stories. But Cheever doesn’t stop there. Instead, he recognizes his own archetype and introduces a new wrinkle, a droll little touch that places Mr. McGrath firmly within the race of men as we know them:

“Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superstition. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder past the other commuters and bend down to get it. ‘Good luck, you know,’ he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. ‘It takes both luck and brains.’”

Here Cheever takes a man of power and apparent substance and renders him childish, a slogan-spewing gull to the silly everyday mysticism of coins and lucky numbers and broken mirrors. The effect of this detail is ambiguous: should the reader sympathize with McGrath (after all, who doesn’t have their pet superstitions)? Or does McGrath’s hustle to pick up a coin, the kind of hustle he apparently resents in other men, allow the reader to dismiss him that much more easily? These ambiguities are what makes Cheever’s characters so funny and vivid, but the best part of this brief portrait is that Herbert McGrath isn’t even an important character in the story. He’s just a guy that our hero, the hapless Will Pym, tries to avoid at a party. Needless to say, poor Will is unsuccessful, and the reader feels the exquisite agony of unavoidable cocktail party chit-chat. It’s all very funny and sad, and Cheever’s prose - as always - is arguably the apex of American English style. Score one for the CheevDawg.  

I told you it was tattered

But I didn’t come here to gush or, worse, over-explain. What I really came here to do, in my critical nanny-nanny-boo-boo sort of way, is point out a flaw. Because what’s more fun than an unnecessary autopsy of a dead genius’ work? (On second thought, don’t answer that).

This thing I’m calling a flaw (but which is really just a matter of taste) only comes up occasionally, only in Cheever’s weakest stories. But when it does rear its head, it can very nearly ruin its otherwise fine surroundings. In the rare instances when I’ve encountered it, I wish I had access to a magical, death-defying phone that would allow me to call Cheever and ask him, in his infinitely stylish wisdom, what the hell he was thinking.

I’m talking, of course, about Cheever’s occasional heavy-handedness, his High Modernist insistence on the literary epiphany. This is not a jab at the epiphany itself as a convention (where would we be without it?), but rather a jab at Cheever’s more ditty-ish mid-50s productions. Sometimes, at their very worst, Cheever’s story-ending epiphanies give me the impression that I’m not reading at all, but am in fact watching a strange, Brechtian play in which a cast member, dressed in rags and grinning lewdly, has produced and is now brandishing a sign that reads, “EPIPHANY HERE!”

By way of example, I will ruin a story for you (my apologies) by quoting from its final paragraph. The story in question is “The Wrysons,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in September of 1958. It is the height of the Cold War, and the Wrysons are a suburban couple very similar to Herbert McGrath in their paranoid bourgeois obsession with Order. But like most suburbanites, and most human beings, Mr. and Mrs. Wryson are odd in ways they feel compelled to hide from the world and from each other. Mrs. Wryson has recurring nightmares of suicide and nuclear holocaust, and Mr. Wryson, for his part, bakes clandestine cakes in the middle of the night as stress relief. When Mrs. Wryson awakes from a routine nightmare to the smell of smoke, she stumbles to the kitchen, where she discovers that her husband has fallen asleep in the middle of baking a cake. This comes as a shock:

“She turned off the oven, and opened the window to let out the smell of smoke and let in the smell of nicotiana and other night flowers. She may have hesitated for a moment, for what would the stranger at the gates - that intruder with his beard and book - have made of this couple, in their nightclothes, in the smoke-filled kitchen at half past four in the morning? Some comprehension - perhaps momentary - of the complexity of life must have come to them, but it was only momentary. There were no further explanations. He threw the cake, which was burned to a cinder, into the garbage, and they turned out the lights and climbed the stairs, more mystified by life than ever, and more interested than ever in a good appearance.”

Beautiful writing, right? Rhythmic and swift, parcelled out in those perfect Cheever rhythms. But what’s with that one sentence, the one that’s almost mockingly epiphanic: “Some comprehension - perhaps momentary - of the complexity of life must have come to them, but it was only momentary.” Surely this sentence wasn’t necessary? Surely Cheever didn’t need to construct a billboard for his own ending, an advertisement for the mysterious profundity he’s baked into his conclusion like sugar in a cake. If I had my way (yeaaaaah right), Cheever would have nixed this sentence in the drafting process, and I think the story would have benefited from its deletion, mostly because it expresses nothing about the characters other than the vague sense that they’re experiencing a Moment.

And thus arises the problem of Cheever’s short fiction: his stories live and die by their epiphanic endings, their success depending almost entirely on the eloquence and style of each epiphany’s expression. When reading Cheever, the question isn’t whether a textbook Modernist epiphany will occur; it becomes, instead, how well, how beautifully and surprisingly, Cheever will deliver the inevitable. In this sense, Cheever emerges as the most illustrative (and probably the most talented) of the writers Donald Barthelme identified, in 1964, as the purveyors of the Chekhovian mousetrap: “Fiction after Joyce seems to have devoted itself… to short stories constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated, or to works written as vehicles to say no! in thunder.” When I first read “The Wrysons,” Barthelme’s words rang out in my head, and my own critical faculties kicked in, casting a dark cloud over this story I’d enjoyed so much up to that point.

Donald Barthelme, c. 1964 - interesting stance there, Don

At the same time, however, Cheever’s endings are almost always good, and more than occasionally great. “The Wrysons” and infrequent stories like it are rare exceptions, although I’m sure many readers would argue that “The Wrysons” is another good-to-great Cheever story, even with its gong-bashing ending. In fact, in my moneyballing estimation, Cheever batted about .900 over an amazingly prolific career, a career that spanned decades of impeccably-wrought stories and quietly boundary-pushing novels. There’s also his admirable career-long arc towards the surreal, an arc that begins in the mid-fifties, in creeping, panicky stories like “The Music Teacher,” and reaches its height in the 60s and 70s, with the now iconic “The Swimmer” and form-scrambling exercises like “A Miscellany of Characters that Will Not Appear.” And unlike the experimentalists whom Cheever seems (mostly) to have ignored, Cheever’s work proves consistently and convincingly emotional, with an unironic sense of moral truth.

All of which begs the question: so what if Cheever was a builder of mousetraps? If he was, then his mousetraps are worth falling into, if only for the delicious cheese.

Specialization, Snobbery, and the School of Carver

A couple years ago, just as I was making the seemingly momentous transition from undergrad to grad student, I decided to become a more “specialized” reader. After all, I was becoming a real academic, and it seemed like the thing to do. But what would I specialize in?

I had read Ulysses, a fact which I liked to sneak into class discussions, apropos of nothing, as if summoning the fictional ghost of Leopold Bloom into any English class would somehow certify my realness, my seriousness, as a reader. But despite all my bragging, I really did love Joyce, and as far as specialties went, the Modernists seemed like the school for me: Woolf, Pound, Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Stein, the whole glorious, convention-busting gang. They were eternally hip.

But then I took a class on Woolf and was introduced to the vast and intimidating body of Modernist criticism. While researching for papers on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, I got the impression of being late to a feast where the banquet table, once a glorious spread, had been pecked down to its grim and final scraps. If I wanted to say or write anything truly new, I would have to move on.  

This brought me to the Post-Modernists, specifically the Americans of the 50s and 60s. These were the writers that had taken the formal innovations of the Modernists as a challenge: how could they move an exhausted Literature forward? How could they write shock into the complacent, stupefying systems of post-war America?

Taking these questions head-on, the Post-Modernists engaged in a lot of bracing, brainy formal experimentation, which is exactly the sort of thing that “turns me on” as a reader. The other thing that drew me to these writers - and this is probably the most important point - is that they were currently unfashionable just about everywhere. No one I knew was reading these books, and by reading them, I was entering into an exclusive, one-man literary club defined by experimentation, intellectual gamesmanship, and a certain hip attachment to irony and the darker side of human affairs.

As I tend to do with my favorite writers or musicians, I became a fan-boy, savoring the cloistered exclusivity of my affections. My Post-Modernists of choice were John Barth, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover. Their books became (and remain) some of my favorites, including Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. Above all others, Pynchon became a sort of god to me.

All-American Badass Robert Coover

Meanwhile, my graduate English program turned out not to encourage “specialized” reading or research at all, instead opting for a widely-ranged and heavily-politicized curriculum that I found more confusing than anything else. By this time, however, my self-imposed specialization had taken hold: I was a Po-Mo junkie with a bad case of the Holier-Than-Thou Blues.

The problem was that I was turning into a smug, elitist douche. In my mind, there was a stark division between my own rarefied tastes and those of the readers and writers around me, who seemed stuck in the mire of Dirty Realism. I saw this “Dirty Realism” as a literary regression, a muck of heavily workshopped sentimentality and phony working-class formalism that was terminally sincere and, worst of all, easy to read. This was the world of Raymond Carver, a writer I had once loved in high school and my early college years, before I’d “wised up” and discovered the aloof, ironical contraptions of Coover and Barthelme.  

My resistance to the School of Carver wasn’t intended as elitism, though. It began as devotion and defense, a stern and unswerving loyalty to the Post-Modernists who were overshadowed by Carver’s 1980s coronation as The Master of the American Short Story. Carver’s novelist counterpart (and a great story writer in his own right) was Richard Ford. I came to resent both men as retrograde artists who had duped a gullible reading public, a whole nation of philistines too slow for the sophistications of a Barth or a Gass.

But then, fairly recently, I went back and actually read Carver and Ford. First came Carver’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which not only blew me away, but also reminded me of why I had loved Carver in the first place. There was the spare intensity of the prose; the broken dreams exposed and poked at in glistening, illuminating shards of everyday life; the hilarious and tragic whiz-bang endings; the true, crackling dialog.

All-American Badass Raymond Carver

Shortly after What We Talk About, I found a similar but totally different set of rewards in Ford’s A Multitude of Sins, a story collection that borrows just as much from Gass as it does from Chekhov. Both books were revelations.

What I discovered after reading them was that I had been ridiculous. Why shut out entire “sections” of literature if they differ from your favorite stuff? Why became a cheerleader for writers when their work can speak for itself? Why police literature or be a snob at all?

In the process, I came to think of Carver (and, to a lesser degree, Ford) as part of a never-ending avant-garde, a lineage of great fiction writers that never stops in one place, never actually settles into one school. The fact of the matter is that even envelope-pushers like John Barth and John Hawkes become Old Unfashionable Dogs at one point or another. This has no bearing on their ultimate value as artists, and it isn’t up to me to dictate their value to the American public. This thing we call “literary fiction” is doomed and blessed never to stay the same, and it certainly hasn’t since Carver’s time. This is a good thing.

I guess my point here is that “specialization,” while healthy in small doses, can also become limiting. It’s alright to play favorites, and Lord knows I’ll continue to do so, but why do it at the expense of other, potentially life-changing writers?

The funny thing about all this is that I’ve spent this entire post splitting hairs about white American men. What the hell kind of specialization is that? Moving forward, I’m trying to generalize my reading, with the one stipulation that I only read “da good shit.”

Because what other specialization does a reader need?