Jason Pettus’s Reviews > The Stories of John Cheever > Status Update

Just finished "An Educated American Woman," in which once again a Cheever story seems to have inspired an episode of "Mad Men," in this case the story of a suburban housewife who us able to ignore her rapidly crumbling family by volunteering as the perpetual chair of whatever latest neighborhood civic organization has been created.

Just finished "A Vision of the World." There seems to have been a point in Cheever's career (around the mid-'60s, based on their location in this chronological story collection) where he became less interested in unique or shocking ideas and more in developing a deeper and more poetic style. This story is a good example of that transition.

Just finished "The Seaside Houses," a particularly haunting story about a man discovering the depths of another family's dysfunction, through the telltale details he finds in their home he's renting for the summer. Definitely one of the Cheever stories to read if you're only going to read a handful of them.

Just finished "The Chimera," one of the better stories in the entire book, in which a suburban husband is so dissatisfied with his life, he makes up a fictitious woman to have an affair with. Plus a priceless scene of trying to find the number of a woman a friend claims is a slut!

Just finished "The Death of Justina," one of Cheever's more grandly poetic tales of dysfunctional suburbia, a darkly comic tale of an old woman who dies in a section of town that was accidentally zoned out of both city and county morgue service, and the ridiculous lengths the family has to go through to get the body buried. A good one for those planning on reading only a handful of Cheever stories.

Just finished "The Music Teacher," a surprisingly creepy story about how a middle-aged man's sudden interest in learning the piano may or may not be part of a convoluted plot to drive his wife insane.

Just finished "The Golden Age," a surprisingly Jamesian story about a staff writer for "Leave It To Beaver" who quits his job in disgust, but can find little emotional comfort at the literal medieval castle in rural Italy he has fled to with his family.

Just finished "Just Tell Me Who It Was." Jealousy is always an ugly, but of course here reaches a point of ridiculous beauty in Cheever's hands.

Just finished "The Scarlet Moving Van," an unusually good treatment of a common Cheever theme (suburban alcoholic husband is a complete monster to everyone around him when drunk). That final image, of him alone with a broken hip in the middle of an otherwise empty subdivision, is priceless.

Just finished "The Duchess," yet another unusual character study set in Rome (or unusual for Cheever, anyway), this one about an Italian noble who marries a blue-collar Brit, and the changing fate of the family from the 1930s through '50s.