Pulizer Project; The Stories of John Cheever

Back in the 1960s I read The Feminine Mystique, the book by Betty Friedan that became part of the feminist canon. Friedan talked about the problem that had no name, suburban housewives going quietly crazy and zoning out on Valium and Seconal. If you ever wondered what all the zombified suburbanites looked like from the male perspective, wonder no more. John Cheever gives us the answer: lots of alcohol and unhappy men musing silently about why their wives don't appreciate just how good middle class life was in the days when families could still afford servants, at least part-time. Turns out the men were just as wretched as the women except they were self-medicating with gin and adultery.

The Stories of John Cheever includes stories spanning about thirty years, from just after World War II up into the 1970s. I could be wrong, but I got the distinct impression the Pulitzer Cheever received for this anthology should have been labeled "Lifetime Achievement Award." By the time the collection came out, Cheever had published several novels and short story collections, all of which had been well-received, and had become one of the Grand Old Men of American literature. He'd even hit the point where he was spending a fair amount of time in Italy. He'd gone from getting drunk in New York to getting sloshed in Rome. There is a reason alcohol plays a prominent role in Cheever's fiction. It played a prominent role in his life.

Although Cheever's stories share many common elements -- suburban life with middle class people worrying way too much about keeping undesirable and nonconforming residents out of their neighborhoods, men silently sipping gin while contemplating banging the babysitter, white collar couples putting on a front while gradually drowning in debt -- there are changes in tone and connections with reality. Cheever dipped into surrealism occasionally, as in "The Swimmer" where the protagonist decides to take an idiosyncratic route home and what to him feels like a long summer day turns into several years passing for everyone else. He could also be wryly amusing, although not  often enough. More typically he describes unhappy people who end up even more unhappy by the time he wraps the story up a few pages later.

Overall, I had a rather mixed reaction to this book. I found myself thinking that Cheever could write -- the book never turned into a hard slog, and I actually whipped through it fairly quickly -- but, wow, the so called professionals Cheever describes were a sleazy, misogynistic bunch. Some of them make the sexist weasels depicted in "Mad Men" look really good in comparison. I really did not have a whole lot of sympathy for men who decided to screw around on their wives and then had to live with unpleasant consequences, and I also didn't particularly enjoy reading about them.

So where does this book fall on the Pulitzer quality spectrum? Well, it didn't totally suck. The writing is decent even if the subject matter wasn't especially engaging. I'll give it a 5. Middle of the pack. Maybe. I'm not sure "it could have been worse" really positions anything quite that high on the scale.

Would I recommend it to other readers? Not really. The stories are competently written but definitely dated and lack the period charm you occasionally find in older works. One or two of the stories might not be a bad way to kill time, but 600 or so pages of Cheever was a little too much.

Next up on the list is a book I'll probably dislike even more: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. I never cared much for Mailer, and knowing that the book is a fictionalized account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore makes it even less appealing.