The Stories of John Cheever

Short stories generally irritate me, leaving me underwhelmed and frustrated at what a only a few pages have to offer. Recently, however, I saw an article by Michael Chabon citing John Cheever's "The Swimmer" as a favorite of his — enough of a recommendation to convince me to have another go at it. Thankfully, my expectations were met with surprise.

The swimmer, Ned Merrill, "might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one." While lazing poolside at a friend's party, Ned decides to swim home, though there are no waterways connecting the two houses. Instead he plans on using the neighborhood swimming pools to make the eight-and-a-half-mile journey. The narration lends a sense of adventure — Ned is a pioneer charting new territory and making discoveries at every bend. The discoveries, however, grow more personal and confusing to him as the trip progresses. At a steady clip, facts become cloudier and friends and neighbors stranger.

With Cheever's beautiful descriptions, we feel the hours pass as a hot summer afternoon turns into a chill autumn evening. Through the progression of Ned's encounters, the story carries an aura of melancholy. Eerily, the mystery unfolds until Ned's journey is complete and a dusky light is shed on the truth.

I finished the story remarkably satisfied, but piqued, and randomly began to consume the stories one after another. This collection contains pieces spanning more than thirty years of Cheever's career. He writes old-fashioned stories with dateless appeal covering themes of water, light, and morality, industry and failure, romantic love and sadness. In Cheever's own words:

"These 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 Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner of the stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like "the Cleveland Chicken," 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."

The narrator experiences the visit as tender and warm, which contrasts with Lawrence's perennial exasperation with his family. For example, at the age of sixteen, he labeled his mother as "frivolous, mischievous, destructive, and overly strong." But, the narrator believes this projection to be the result of Lawrence's basic refusal to embrace life, which leads to the realization that the lifelong rift between the brothers may always remain. The sadness that accompanies this conclusion is palpable.

The philosophical difference bewteen the brothers is acknowledged early in the story:

"Then I remembered Lawrence's sensitivity to time and his sentiments and opinions about our feelings for the past. I heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure."

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