NOVELISTS
(See Cover) My mind is bent to tell of bodies
changed into new forms. Ye gods, for
you yourselves have wrought the
changes, breathe on these my undertakings,
and bring down my song in
unbroken strains from the world's very
beginning even unto the present time.
When the Roman poet Ovid wrote this supplication, "the present time" was roughly the time of Christ, when it was far easier to think of gods becoming men, beasts or monsters and to see the palpable world as the creature of unseen magical forces.
It is the peculiar and original genius of Novelist John Cheever to see his chosen subject—the American middle class entering the second decade of the Affluent Society—as figures in an Ovidian netherworld of demons. Commuterland, derided by cartoonists and deplored by sociologists as the preserve of the dull-spirited status seeker, is given by Cheever's fables the dignity of the classical theater.
All this has escaped attention largely because the U.S. bourgeoisie has not been encouraged to think well of itself; indeed, it has been made accustomed to having its very virtues excoriated by the writing classes. More important, Cheever, like a demiurge disguised in street clothes, has hidden the demonic quality in his work under the conventional natural-shoulder style of the realistic story.
But at least popular neglect seems to be coming to an end. The Wapshot Scandal (TIME, Jan. 24), the second of his two novels, is selling at a brisk 2,000 copies a week, and has already topped the total sales of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle—although the Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958. Movie rights to both have been bought for $75,000, but it seems likely that any movie will mirror merely the realism. Cheever has been long acknowledged as a master of the short story, of which he has written over a hundred. Some are merely slick or O. Henryish, but some, such as The Country Husband, The Death of Justina, Goodbye, My Brother, are as perfect as a short story can get, and have dimensions and echoes far beyond their relatively small compass.
A Local Habitation. Cheever's art deals less with what is called character and idiosyncrasy than with archetypes: father, son, brother, husband, wife, lover, seen in situations so intensely felt as to claim universality. His people move like characters in classic drama; the actors wear their fixed masks and are not expected to change one mask for another in the course of the action. Over the formal masks are fitted others modeled in the naturalistic detail required by the conventions of realism. He is able to give to the abstract personalia of this theater a local habitation and a name—a habitation so truly seen in detail that it becomes more real than the town's tax rolls. But the easygoing realism that accepts wife-swapping or any impiety of evaded obligation with a sociological shrug enrages him, for at bottom he is a New England moralist.
In real life, Cheever country is that strip of New York's Westchester County that stretches from the Rockefeller estate in the Pocantico Hills along the wooded ridges of the Hudson's east shore to the estuary of the Croton River. "Except that he does not commute, John leads a fairly orthodox commuter's life," says his friend E. J. Kahn