The Stories of John Cheever

I have returned to many of these stories over and over again through the years—for Cheever’s prose, for his sense of what makes men tick. On one level, I can’t quite relate to white suburban husbands in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s. And yet, somehow, they seem profoundly familiar. 

Not only is Cheever’s "The Swimmer" part of the “canon” of literary works about swimming, it’s widely considered one of the greatest works of short fiction. He frames the journey as an Odyssey with all the classical echoes that suggests. The protagonist, Ned Merrill, decides to swim back to his home through the pools of his suburban neighbors, a journey that starts out as a lark and slowly turns into a descent into hell. In truth, the story is less about swimming than suburban life in the 1950s, but it packs a powerful punch.

For several years after graduating from college, free to read the books of my choice, I went wild – if one can go wild – at the local library walking distance from my apartment. I always left with a tall stack of books. It was then that I got my first taste of Anais Nin, Doris Lessing, Albert Camus, Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great television plays of the 1950s… I was in heaven. When I began reading John Cheever’s short stories, I was captured like none other, experiencing something his characters often do: an epiphany. I suddenly understood how just… show more.

We might as well start with the master. Here are sixty-one of Cheever’s short stories, carefully curated. His breadth and depth are astonishing: an east-coast WASP who often set his stories in suburbia or in New York but ranged as far as Italy, Cheever, to the accompaniment of ice-cubes clinking in a bourbon glass, peels away the thin membrane of the seemingly banal and mundane so that we glimpse the mysterious seething unconscious forces that drive our lives. Some of his stories tiptoe right into the Twilight Zone: “The Enormous Radio” and his masterpiece “The Swimmer” bend the mind and… show more.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this is the gold standard - it doesn’t get any better than this. Cheever is to the short story what Edward Hopper is to painting: an absolute master at conveying the inner life of his characters, and to quote Philip Roth, “an enchanted realist.” I know many people say they don’t like short stories because there isn’t enough character/plot development, but these stories are like a beautifully engineered watch - everything you need is there.