this baby's a classic

traveling to the UK.

in the mail as of 2/6/06

Thanks to Amykinofallkins for taking the initiative on this one, posting it to me from the USA. I've been looking out for the short story The Swimmer for nearly ten years, ever since reading a reference to it in Roger Deakin's excellent book Waterlog.

I'll be sending this on to Wormyone once I've read this as it is on her wishlist. If you are interested let either or both of us know.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

This book is taking a long time because I'm reading each story between other books. WormyOne has been after it for ages 'though, so I'm passing it to her for a bit. I've got as far as The Summer Farmer although I read The Swimmer first, which was my main reason for wanting the book.

Thanks to Forager for enabling me to cross this off my wish list. Like him, I'm interested to read The Swimmer having seen the Burt Lancaster film.

The blurb reads:

"Like radiant, graceful chapters of the novel that is the American heart, THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER live in the community of emotions and dreams. The men and women of John Cheever are creatures of beauty, tragedy, and restless privilege. And always they soar from the sadness of life to the older and more elegant realms of light, desire, memory, tenderness, highballs, private schools, empty churches, rented summer houses, love and sanctuary, adultery and truth".

I've just finished Goodbye, My Brother, the first story in this book. From just this one story, I'm sure that I'm going to be impressed with this collection.

Told in the first person, it describes the alienation from his family of the protagonist's brother. The family has its ways of doing things and resents the brother for choosing his own directions. What none of the family see is how, by setting his way up as right, and the others as wrong, the brother is in fact acting in line with the family's culture.

The narrator is so caught up in sitting in judgment on his brother that he has lost the ability to relate to him, and all love and sympathy between them has gone.

The density of this 22-page story is such that I'm left with as much to think about as if I'd reached the end of a full-blown novel.

I'll update this journal entry (rather than creating a new one) if I want to comment on other stories as I work my way through this collection.

15/3/09 I think the stories (which are ordered chronologically according to when they were written) are getting darker. The Music Teacher has got a supernatural edge.

This is an excellent book to keep by you and read when you've got a short time available as each story is brief enough to read in ten or twenty minutes. Each one is carefully constructed and engaging. Some are more narrative than others and some are darker than others. Cheever's sardonic humour is evident in most. For example:

"The thought of tobacco made Mrs Cabot choleric. Could one imagine Christ on the Cross smoking a cigarette? she would ask us. Could one imagine the Virgin Mary smoking? A drop of nicotine fed to a pig by trained laboratory technicians had killed the beast. Etc. She made smoking irresistible, and if I die of lung cancer I shall blame Mrs Cabot".

The majority of the earlier works are set in the suburban small town of Shady Hill, from where the men commute to work on the train, leaving their wives at home doing housework, drinking, and meeting up to complain about their husbands, and to regret the successful careers as famous actresses or singers they sacrificed by marrying them. Affairs are commonplace, everyone drinks gallons and smokes like a chimney and evenings are spent at neighbourhood house or pool parties. When Cheever's characters don't live in Shady Hill, they are often American ex-pats in Italy searching for the passionate, earthy, Mediterranean life of their fantasies.

As a collection, these stories present a witty perspective on white American middle-class life from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. John Cheever's short preface is a delight to read, both before and after reading the stories.

Returned to Forager.

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