John Cheever, Enchanted Realist

The years of my life are often marked by whatever I read or listened to that year that impressed me most, and I recall each year fondly on that basis. Last year it was War and Peace, which I expected to enjoy far more than I actually did, sad to say. The year before that, it was Raymond Carver's entire oeuvre, along with first wife Maryann Carver's book, What It Used to Be Like -- a frank recounting of her long, destructive marriage to the alcoholic Carver -- whose real-life incidents figured into Carver's stories often very directly. The year before that it was Lolita. I had never read it and was absolutely bowled over not just by the beauty and skill of Nabokov's prose, but by the way in which he made me complicit in his awful crimes. The year before that it was the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, which was so thrilling, it practically mandated that I finally read War and Peace, which, as I said, turned out to be less thrilling by half.

This year it's John Cheever, and what a happy reader he's made me. Though I've not yet graduated to his novels, I'm reading the excellent, prize-winning The Stories of John Cheever, as well as his exquisite journals. Philip Roth is the one who called him an "enchanted realist," and it's as good an epithet as I could want. The thing that awes me is the degree of specificity he brings to his setting, and then to his characters, and then to his story, and then to his understanding of human nature. It goes without saying that one can't deal in specificity of this sort without a keen intellect, a wide, writer's vocabulary, and a ruthlessly observant eye.

Here's a passage I enjoyed from last night's story, "The Lowboy:"

Some people make less of an adventure than a performance of their passions. They do not seem to fall in love and make friends but to cast, with men, women, children, and dogs, some stirring drama that they were committed to producing at the moment of their birth. This is especially noticeable on the part of those whose casting is limited by a slender emotional budget. The clumsy performances draw our attention to the play. The ingenue is much too old. So is the leading lady. The dog is the wrong breed, the furniture is ill-matched, the costumes are threadbare, and when the coffee is poured there seems to be nothing in the pot. But the drama goes on with as much terror and pity as it does in more magnificent productions.