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Oct 02, 2011

Joy H. rated it:

Cheever: A Life (Audio CD) by Blake Bailey
Added 4/20/11.
GR description: "Blake Bailey's biography focuses on the gaping disparity between Cheever's proud Yankee social persona and his lifelong inner turmoil."

READ SAMPLE OF THIS BOOK HERE:
http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id...

NOTE: Cheever won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, a compilation of his short stories. Read a sample of these short stories here: http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id... More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2009

Hannah rated it:

Dangit, Blake Bailey. I am really loving Palace Walk, but you are like my goddamned idol at this point--I don't like biographies, barely care about Cheever, and am too BUSY to mess with this right now. And yet . . . sigh. What a wonderful jorb you do.

Man, this guy really kills me. Blake Bailey writes a biography like Richard Yates writes a novel. Given, the material is sweet as hell, and that helps, but I swear, if I were a thirteen-year old I would put a poster of Blake Bailey More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2011

Joan rated it:

This highly praised biography gets a mixed critique from me. Bailey does a good job of invigorating the spirit of Cheever, so one truly understands his complicated psyche. Yet, his writing as a whole is often awkward; e.g. rather than use the name of a individual stated in a prior sentence, he will say "the man" or "the woman" which tends to stop the reader in his tracks. Beyond awkward, it is confusing. This is just one example of Bailey's difficulty with usage. His descript More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 24, 2009

Tony rated it:

Bailey, Blake. CHEEVER: a life. (2009). ****. I always wonder when I encounter a massive biography like this one as to who is the intended audience. Although well written and meticulously researched and documented, I often suspect that major parts of this near-700-page volume are speed-read by the majority of readers (like me). I suspect that when you really get down to it, I prefer the length of Plutarch’s Lives to something really massive like this. Cheever had a bad childhood. His fat More...

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Sep 18, 2010

Linda rated it:

Cheever, A Life, the biography of the writer, John Cheever was fabulous and I’m not sure why I liked it so much. He was a lonely bi-sexual, a drunk for most of his life, an unhappy man, but I loved this book.
It was honest and told his life clearly, yet no one seemed to know him well as he lived it. Everyone seemed to think of him as a nice and kindly man except for his wife who despised him for most of his life and his children who didn’t understand him. These were the people, inciden More...

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Aug 30, 2009

Moira added it

Somewhat dryly and harshly written -- the author doesn't seem that much charmed by Cheever's prose or his personality, which are both luminous. But this is definitely the definitive biography; it makes Donaldson's fairly substantive earlier book look like a puff piece. It includes new, lengthy interviews with family members, careful chronological tracings of stories beginning and blooming (complete with unpublished working notes -- altho the whole book is rather sadly lacking in literary crit More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 08, 2011

Richard rated it:

See John Cheever. Hi John Cheever!

See John Cheever have a miserable childhood. Hello domineering mother. Hello alcoholic father.

See John Cheever suffer from insecurities and sexual confusion. Is he gay? Is he straight? Is he too upper-middle class? Do people know he never went to college? Is he as popular as Philip Roth? What about Saul Bellow?

See John Cheever try to escape from his problems by drinking too much alcohol.

See alcoholism destroy John More...

3 comments like

Aug 05, 2011

Paul rated it:

Bailey's brick of a biography seems to get only better as it moves steadfastly along. In the beginning (NB the first chapter's title, "1637–1912"), it seems impatient to jump ahead to the meat of Cheever's life, and, as it can't quite help itself, often feels irritatingly achronological. Certain biographies are better handling "the early/family years" than others, and Bailey's does feel a bit sluggish during the time before Cheever started writing (i.e. the good bits). Of cou More...

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Sep 15, 2010

Terry rated it:

Hmmm. I think this book is very thorough, and it's well-written, and thus it measures up to my "gold standard" of literary biographies, Middlebrook's book on Anne Sexton.

Yet somehow this book left me feeling deflated. On one hand it exhaustively discusses the genesis and execution of many of his stories and his novels, which is generally good knowledge to have. On the other hand, the bulk of the book seems consumed with Cheever's bisexuality/homosexuality and the agony it More...

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Jan 14, 2010

Nathan rated it:

A biography with the fine, inexorable action of Greek tragedy, with a central figure drawn with a sympathetic yet honest eye. Bailey has absorbed the depth of Cheever's art without becoming besotted by it, yet neither is he ignorant of its moment. As well, the literary biographer's balancing act between author and works is executed with a confident, intelligent panache.

It is on the subject of Cheever's sexual life that Bailey stumbles; a voyeuristic, almost tabloidish attention is pa More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 15, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it:

Most critics felt that Blake Bailey's book was an admirable work of scholarship and approved of his task of encouraging people to read Cheever again. But they disagreed about the extent to which Cheever succeeds as a literary biography. A few reviewers thought that Bailey had done an incomparable job of integrating the details of the man's life with his work. Others, however, opined that the book's exhaustive detail gives readers almost no insight into Cheever the author. Most assessments were m

More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 23, 2010

Jeff added it

This terrific book goes immediately to my top shelf of literary biographies. John Cheever lived in endless turmoil with his contradictions—the erudite high school dropout; the closeted bisexual who despised gay men, guilt-ridden, manipulative and rampant in his pursuits; the snob most at ease with workers; a man who idealized husband-and-fatherhood, and an alcoholic compulsively unkind to his children and estranged from his wife. Given a lesser biographer all this could be merely lurid, but Bail More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 08, 2009

Mike rated it:

It's an enlightening experience to read Blake Bailey's biography, though not in the way I would have expected. Bailey is a fine writer and an obviously indefatigable researcher, but in terms of a general sense of Cheever's life, there is not much in his book that you can't get from Scott Donaldson's John Cheever (1988). Spending seven hundred pages in close proximity to this haunted, irascible, petulant, and deeply humane man's life has only confirmed my ultimate ignorance of exactly how literar More...

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Aug 08, 2010

Sull rated it:

What a book & what a man! 700 pages & in some ways a really crazy fellow, a compulsive social climber whose single-minded, nearly fanatic pursuit of "being a writer" came first, before love, before family, before health in the end. A relentless chaser of his own dreams, which were interesting (magical) enough to enthrall my parents' generation of post-war 50's suburbanites, a new phenomena that he wrote for & to.

But so crazy. Secret facets of his own personality made sub- More...

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Jan 02, 2010

Tomrobotham rated it:

This book is wholly absorbing. Bailey paints a vivid portrait of a man who wanted desperately to be a good husband and a good father but was often astonishingly cruel to his wife and children. For most of his life he was a raging alcoholic who veered between a pompous sense of superiority and profound self-hatred. He despised, most of all, his bisexuality. But more often than not he also felt like a failure as a writer, even though he became a prolific contributor to The New Yorker and won lots More...

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May 17, 2010

Patrick rated it:

By today's standards, it seems as though John Cheever would not be a very popular writer. He was (for the most part) a brutally honest man without a college education who drank constantly, maintained a persona of an effeminate blue blood, was ashamed of his (then) 'uncommon' and insatiable sexual appetite, and had great difficulty producing actual novels, opting frequently for his now signature short works, which gave the world a quick glance into the strange emotional inner-workings of suburban More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 20, 2011

Thomas rated it:

After he died, the writer John Cheever’s family made the decision to bury his body in the Norwell Center cemetery, right next to his parents’ remains. As his youngest son Federico observed, it was the last place in the world he would have wanted to be buried.” Cheever had spent his entire life running from (what he perceived to be) the sins of his mother and father, the chaos of his childhood home. One could argue (without much objection) that his entire being was devoted to the pursuit of th More...

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Feb 13, 2010

Mike rated it:

Pretty heartbreaking, really, though also funny and insightful and very, very thoroughly researched. One thing I really like about the book is how it dispels some of the romanticism of the "drunk, tormented writer" type. To live inside Cheever's head -- through his journals, in particular -- is to see how his drinking and depression often got in the way of his work, rather than serving as some kind of mystical inspiration. In the end, the portrait is a pretty loving one, but depressing More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 08, 2009

Gloria rated it:

After reading this excellent well written biography, which is filled with sympathy and admiration, I am going back to read all of Cheever. A conflicted guy who faced his fears in his journals. He destroyed the people who loved him and worshiped total strangers, found solace in the night after drinking a martini and then wonders why in the morning light. I can relate. The writer found Cheever's language. He was a man who could drink the Russians to the floor, but he was also capable of articu More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 11, 2011

Harley rated it:

When I was an English major, we rarely discussed the biographic information on writers. We focused on the work. The work was all that mattered. So this is only the second biography that I have read about a writer. I think I have missed important information that would have helped my understanding of the work. The other biography of a writer that I read was e. e. cummings, one of my favorite poets. Prior to reading this biography, I had never read anything by John Cheever. I owned a collec More...

2 comments like

Oct 27, 2010

Jason rated it:

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As a general rule, it can be said that the newer an artistic movement, the more difficult it is to fully understand it, because of a lack of both historical distance and "how it really happened" stories regarding important turning points; given this, then, I suppose it's safe to call Po More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2011

James rated it:

This is a very full biography of Cheever touching all the facets of his life. I like it that the breadth and depth of it seems to attempt to tell it all rather than casting some new and unusual hook to bring him to the surface. It's as complete and definitive as we'll get for now. But it's unstartling, too. There are a couple of reasons for that, I think. First is that by now Cheever's bisexuality is well known. The second is that the book is very sympathetic to Cheever himself. This may More...

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Jul 10, 2009

Liz rated it:

I should have reviewed this right when I finished it so it would all still be fresh in my head, but here goes:

I have been a huge Cheever fan since I was a teenager and have always wished that he was the "venerable New England author" who lived on the street in Ipswich where I was born instead of Updike. (Updike can suck it, if you ask me. He wrote some decent short stories, but the Rabbit books are the most boring, misogynistic sack of poo that I have ever zzzzzzz....) I More...

4 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 30, 2009

Nicholas rated it:

I'd been looking forward to this biography for a while (Bailey's previous biography of Richard Yates is among my favorite books). I found Bailey's life of Cheever to be equally impressive (the amount of detail is almost overwhelming), but I didn't fall in love with Cheever, as he comes to life on the page, as much as I'd fallen in love with Yates. This has less to do with Bailey and much more to do with Cheever and Yates and my sympathetic inclinations. True, both men were alcoholic, troubled, s More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 08, 2010

Elias rated it:

This is a wonderful book by an excellent author. Bailey digs deeply into the life of Cheever to give us a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the mid twentieth centuries most prolific short story writers. Cheever was a truly larger than life character who, with precious little formal education, wrote stories that were unique and astounding. A closeted gay man who drank prodigiously he was a magnetic presence. If you care about mid-century literature read this book then read Cheever.

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Jan 27, 2010

Ellenyo rated it:

This is a stupendous biography. I couldn't stop reading, and no, I didn't skim one bit. At times it read like a suspense novel. I've been a fond devotee of Cheever's stories for years and had read some of his published journals (which are almost as good reading as his stories), but I never knew much about him. Being bisexual and an alcoholic doesn't seem all that unusual, after all. His great gifts were his masterly storytelling and beautiful prose style.

Well, Bailey gave me a gift More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 28, 2010

Cv rated it:

I haven't read much Cheever in my life, but this autobiography came highly recommended so I picked it up. It's good, well-written, and gives a fascinating inside look at the writing culture of the East Coast literati of the last century.

My problem with it is that I just didn't care. It's not really a reflection of the quality of the book or of the competence of the writer, it's just that I wasn't interested in Cheever and I probably shouldn't have tried to read a book about him.

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Nov 11, 2011

Amblingbooks.com marked it as to-read

"The most exquisite, compelling, and heartbreaking life I've yet encountered. Blake Bailey doesn't merely write like an angel, he is an angel-he seamlessly resuscitates the past to make it live and breathe in the present, and he writes with all the power and authority of our finest novelists." - T. C. Boyle, author of The Women

Listen to Cheever on your smartphone.

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Aug 03, 2011

Kris rated it:

I read lots and lots of John Cheever in college, not for any class but because a friend introduced me to Cheever's short stories. I knew little about the man then but love this biography, which is unflinchingly honest about the author's many characteristics including his severe alcoholism and lifelong struggle with his sexual identity, jealousy and narcissism, but also his loyalties and kindnesses. Bailey's bio is also compassionate and illuminating about Cheever's commitment to the moral and sp More...

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Sep 07, 2009

Pip rated it:

Blake Bailey has spent years bringing a fresh new biography out about this complicated writer who was the toast of the town when Novels were the pop culture of the day. Bailey also helped pull together a collected short stories and complete novels editions for Library of America. These are lovely compact books with ribbons included for book marks. I always felt it would have been great if a movie featuring William Holden as Cheever was made.

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