I read and loved this book when it was first published, in January of 1984. I just reread it — 40 years later — and loved it again.
I was unable to discern Susan Cheever’s underlying outline for this book’s structure, but I cannot think of another book of this type in which the author moves forward and backward in time so masterfully, so (seemingly) effortlessly, and so beautifully.
She writes, at one point:
“Life for my father was either unbearable or transcendent. He watched the suburban women’s daily migration to the railroad station to drop off their husbands, and sometimes they were a band of angels wearing nightdresses under their coats, and sometimes they were the Furies, nagging and shrill at the wheels of their mortgaged station wagons. He watched the men coming home on the train, and sometimes they were successful gentlemen of good will, and sometimes they were debauched failures fleeing from their own lewd mistakes. Sometimes the lights and music from the suburban parties wafted out of pleasant houses where handsome men and women enjoyed each other’s company, and sometimes the parties were grotesque minuets of adulterous golfers and their promiscuous wives. My father noticed too well that the comfortable lives his friends and neighbors had so painstakingly fashioned for themselves were an ineffectual bulwark against the ancient human lusts and expectations that pick up men and women and dash them screaming on the rocks of their own desires. The stories he wrote during those years are so vivid, so alive with detail and pleasure and dread, that for a long time it looked as though that was all anyone would remember of his work.”
Indeed.
Brilliant and equally insightful passages like that one appear throughout this book. If you love the work of John Cheever, I think that you will also love this beautiful, loving, but not at all hagiographic “biographical memoir” written by his daughter.
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