The Stories of John Cheever takes readers into a strange and wondrous land where radios broadcast the private conversations of neighbors that reveal the banality of their worst transgressions of morality and where in-ground swimming pools can become a means of conveyance through the neighborhood back to the safety (or lack thereof) of home. The bulk of Cheever’s short fiction was begin with and was informed by the dawn of a brand new and quite revolutionary concept for placing a starkly defined boundary between the world of work and the world of domesticity.
It was a place that for many came to represent the American Dream in its most tangible and palpable way. It was a place that seemed to exist outside the pages of a New Yorker magazine featuring the latest fiction from that Cheever guy and was almost a perpetual setting on at least one of three or four channels a TV antenna brought into the home every day. It was a place not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved: a place called suburbia.
Although today, probably most people in America would say they do or have lived in suburbia, when Cheever began chronicling it, it was a very specific term for a very specific evolution in living condition. A comparison between The Honeymooners and The Dick Van Dyke Show is very apt: both husbands went to work in New York City, TV writer Rob Petrie left that world behind it was time to head home whereas bus driver Ralph Kramden never got out of the city. This dualism of suburban life (at least for male characters) creates the thematic foundation on which Cheever examines the consequences of this bifurcation.
For instance, most of these stories are very much grounded in a reality where the commonplace and social rituals are so stultifying that they become part of the pattern of explosive psychological moments of high drama. And yet, within this prosaic portrait of excessive normality, Cheever very often introduces elements of creative dualism: that radio that broadcasts the neighbors’ dirty laundry, those swimming pools that send a man traveling home back and forth in time, an imaginary mistress for a bored husband whom he doesn’t even have the power to summon at will or stop from flirting with other men!
Part of the mythical appeal of suburban life for many in the early decades of post-World War II America eventually gave rise to a term tarnishing its image: “white flight.” The more pastoral setting of life in the ‘burbs without actually meaning you had to give up everything and move to the boondocks was invested with the promise of escape from the skyrocketing urban crime figures in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Sure, there was crime in the suburbs—even the Petries’ got burglarized on TV—but it seemed as if the farther one got away from the concrete jungle, there civilized the community could become. Cheever’s reliance upon an omniscient narrator for most of these stories allows for ironic commentary upon the corrosive corruption of the home by infiltration from the city. This device is especially well-displayed in the almost surreal composition of fundamental character flaws in in the title character of “The Swimmer” and, curiously enough, in both the adulterous husband his jilted stalker in “The Five-Forty-Eight.”
The totality of Cheever’s examination of the moral and social complexity of trying to live in two different worlds usually connected by an hour or so on the train in the morning and then again in the afternoon situates the lifestyle as not being any more inherently good or bad or investing the nature of its populace with any more distinctly drawn negative or positive aspects than any other. The people inhabiting Cheever’s stories are relentlessly normal and average; it just so happens that the reader comes across during the most atypically extraordinary moments in their lives. That there is a certain similarity of social construction is party the message. Cheever’s stories remind us any insular world partly intended as protection against the affronts seem as threats to happiness or security from outside that world will inevitably create codes of behavior and define ideological assumptions. It isn’t suburbia that created the Neddy Merrills or created the context for the comeuppance of Mr. Blake at the hands of Miss Dent. The implicit suggestion by Cheever is that it was man who made suburbia and not suburban existence which made these men.
