The Commute from Hell

John Cheever has fallen out of favor lately.  Perhaps he’s too much a traditional realist to get much attention these days.  No gimmicks.  No cute tricks. My bet is that the pendulum will swing back and Cheever will once again be appreciated for his literary gifts.  He is best known for his short stories.  No better book to have by your beside than ‘The Stories of John Cheever’, available in paperback.  Pick it up and read a story when you’re in the mood.  You won’t be disappointed.  ‘Goodbye, My Brother’, ‘The Enormous Radio’, and of course ‘The Swimmer’ are among my favorites.

Cheever also wrote five novels.  I recently read ‘Bullet Park’ (1969), a scathing indictment of life in the New York suburbs in the 1960’s.  Cheever sees through the superficial cheer to the underlying despair and desperation.  Alcohol, drug use, hypocritical religiosity, the medical profession, television, and adultery are all revealed here as evidence of the darkness at the center of ‘Father Knows Best’.  As a cultural study the book is indeed very interesting.  As a work of fiction, it’s more of a mixed bag.

I’m not sure that the novel holds together as an entity.  The first two-thirds concern Eliot Nailles, a middle-aged husband and father with a good heart who accepts much of what he sees in good faith and only gradually becomes aware the dangers that surround him and his family.  The last part of the book is narrated by Paul Hammer, a disturbed and sinister man.  Each section contains some wonderful writing, but the mood shift is so pronounced as to make it hard to fit them together in the same short novel.  Almost as if we have several short stories here that have been loosely knit together to make a longer work of fiction.

The last few chapters are suspenseful, and the sense of growing menace is particularly effective against the backdrop of smiley suburbia, but I can’t help but feel that Cheever did much the same in ‘The Swimmer’.  But the short story is a precisely cut gem.  The novel is not nearly so refined.

But I whine.  Cheever is always worth reading.  Maybe sometime I’ll tackle the memoirs.  He kept notebooks through most of his adult life.  It was a difficult life.  He wasn’t an easy person.  But the man could write.