John Cheever Fiction Is an Art and Art Is Triumph Over Chaos
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
My rating: v of 5 stars
The Stories of John Cheever (1978) by John Cheever is a collection of 61 stories that won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1979.
As expected, "The Enormous Radio" (pg 33) and "The Swimmer" (pg 603), two of Cheever'due south most popular and most read stories, are included in this 693-folio book, just other bottom-known and more than obscure stories (showcasing Cheever at his best) appear and oft proceed the pages turning. For example: "The Pot of Gilded" (pg 103); "The Cure" (pg 156); "The Country Hubby" (pg 325); "The Aureate Age" (pg 396); "The Death of Justina" (pg 429); "Boy in Rome" (pg 452); "The World of Apples" (pg 613); "Another Story" (pg 624); "Percy" (pg 634); and, "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger" (pg 650).
Even Cheever in his short story "The Decease of Justina" offers advice to writers (and readers) about the art of fiction and writing stories:
"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and nosotros can accomplish this simply by the most vigilant do of pick, just in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive in that location is ever the danger that our powers of choice will be mistaken and that the vision nosotros serve will come up to nothing" (pg 429).
Cheever's stories practise come to something, and together these stories correspond fiction as art.
Cheever doesn't shy away from controversial topics either. He takes a stand up and proclaims it boldly; for better or worse, he makes his points articulate regarding his views on fiction every bit fine art, and he fifty-fifty has a few things to say about certain characters writers should choose to write (or not to write) about:
"(5) Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the style we live.
"(6) And while we are about it, out go all those homosexuals who have taken such a dominating position in recent fiction. Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the mankind and moved on?" (from "Characters that Will Non Appear," pg 469).
Meet, Cheever knew and so what amateur and professional writers still fail to understand today. Certain issues are temporal and uninspiring. Certain issues fail to reveal the humanity that appeals to readers across the globe in every language and every civilization. Certain bug fail to hold the interests of "evolved" adults. Sure, you tin write about anything you desire (who can't?), but the best writers practice have a choice to seek out storytelling every bit an artform to showcase humanity (this being our emotions, aspirations, our souls and non the color of our faces, our sexual preferences, our nationalities, how we may choose to place or how we desire the world to identify with us—issues of gender, race, nationality, sexuality, and identity are all themes for children and young adults and have their places in literature for students in simple schools and loftier schools) and the best writers who fully grasp the notions of fiction as art are going to stand the tests of time, culture, fads, political regimes, and momentary popular interests of all various shapes and sizes.
From Cheever'due south "The Common Day," Cheever illustrates how "humanity" tin can shape literature into an artform by displaying people (not "races," just "souls") as they live out fifty-fifty a perfunctory life:
"Agnes Shay had the truthful spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and balmy eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in dorsum passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind ane of a prison, her soul had grown docile and dour. The ranks of service appeared to her as simply and inflexible as the rings of hell. She would no more have yielded Mrs. Garrison a identify at the servants' tabular array in the kitchen than Mrs. Garrison would have yielded her one in the gloomy dining room…
"On fine evenings, when she sat on the dorsum porch betwixt the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to retrieve the faces of all the cooks she had known. Information technology made her life seem rich" (pg 25).
And then what race is Agnes? What is the color of her pare? What country does she come from? Does it matter?
I would say that it does non, considering the "humanity" and the "soul" are ever present and one tin about taste the personality and the aspirations of this usually maid who is simply as stubborn as all those apprentice writers who endeavour to forcefulness high school themes onto well-educated adults.
Another moment then from Cheever (since you aren't convinced yet almost "humanity" and the "soul"). This snippet comes from Cheever's "O Metropolis of Broken Dreams":
"Their kid slept with her thumb in her rima oris. Her pilus was dark and her muddied face was lean, like her mother's. When a violent movement of the train roused her, she drew noisily at her thumb until she lost consciousness over again. She had been unable to store up as much finery as her parents, since she was only five years erstwhile, but she wore a white fur coat. The matching lid and muff had been lost generations earlier; the skins of the coat were sere and worn, but every bit she slept, she stroked them, as if they had remarkable backdrop that bodacious her that all was well, all was well" (pg 43).
I who is a parent tin encounter and almost touch her own child sleeping. This is what Cheever does best: bring humanity and the soul to the page. He asks you to end thinking about all the political issues, to stop thinking about your identity (later all, the but ones who care about identity and race are the ones who care about identity and race), and Cheever asks you to stop and stare at this sleeping little infant and be reminded about what information technology means to be a kid once again in the arms of your mother or what it means to be a father property your son for the first fourth dimension.
And what of emotions? Cheever will give yous every final one, and there's no doubt he has intensely studied them all.
From "The Sutton Identify Story," the reader can feel the drama, the weight of the soul in turmoil, come to life and weigh on them just as heavily as on the characters on the page:
"'I experience filthy with guilt. I feel every bit though I'd been a rotten mother and a rotten wife and as though this were penalisation. I've broken every vow and every promise that I've ever made. I've broken all the expert promises. When I was a trivial girl, I used to make promises on the new moon and the offset snowfall. I've broken everything skillful. But I'm talking every bit though we'd lost her, and nosotros oasis't lost her, accept we? They'll detect her, the policeman said they'd observe her.'
"'They'll find her,' Robert said.
"The room darkened. The depression clouds had touched the city. They could hear the pelting as it fell against the building and the windows" (pg 76).
Cheever knows what touches the hearts of men and women and he knows the issues that befall u.s.a. all (as human beings and not as a specific race, which causes partitioning over unity).
In "The Summertime Farmer," Cheever asks us to expect closer at the people (of all colors, of all nationalities, of all sexual preferences) and he asks u.s.a. to consider the weights that each of us carries within:
"It is true of fifty-fifty the best of united states of america that if an observer can catch us boarding a train at a fashion station; if he will mark our faces, stripped by anxiety of their self-possession; if he will appreciate our luggage, our wear, and look out of the window to encounter who has driven us to the station; if he will listen to the harsh or tender things we say if we are with our families, or notice the fashion we put our suitcase onto the rack, check the position of our wallet, our cardinal ring, and wipe the sweat off the dorsum of our necks; if he can estimate sensibly the self-importance, diffidence, or sadness with which we settle ourselves, he will exist given a broader view of our lives than well-nigh of us would intend" (pg 88).
In "Percy," Cheever reminds united states of america that our humanity is closely tied to the sea:
"Since the bounding main is our well-nigh universal symbol for memory, might in that location not be some mysterious analogousness between these published recollections and the thunder of waves" (pg 634).
Cheever does have a way with words, and that is why people are still reading his brusque stories and his novels. Even love is off-white game for Cheever and he makes it equally though fourth dimension can be stopped in its falling sands.
In "The Bus to St. James's," Cheever considers the very all-time parts of our humanity: love, tenderness, and hope:
"For lovers, bear on is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. That office of their experience that is singled-out and separate, the totality of the years earlier they met, is inverse, is redirected toward this moment. They experience they accept reached an identical point of intensity, an ecstasy of rightness that they control in every function, and any recollection that occurs to them takes on this final clarity, whether it exist a sweep manus on an airport clock, a snowfall owl, a Chicago railroad station on Christmas Eve, or anchoring a yawl in a strange harbor while all along the stormy coast strangers are blowing their horns for the yacht-club tender, or running a ski trail at that 60 minutes when, although the sun is withal in the sky, the north face up of every mountain lies in the dark" (pg 279).
Yeah, Cheever, yes; it is exactly similar that. And in so many wordless ways, that is how information technology should be.
Without question, if you oasis't read The Stories of John Cheever, then put this onetime book on your new reading list. You'll live a hundred lives while reading Cheever and when you lot're done, you'll walk abroad all that more aware and contented in a life you lot so often took for granted.
Keep reading and proceed smiling…
The American novelist CG FEWSTON has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Italy), a Visiting Swain at Hong Kong's CityU, & he'south a been fellow member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, Social club Med, & the Royal Lodge of Literature. He's also a been Swain of the Purple Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London.
He'south the writer of several curt stories and novels. His works include A Father's Son (2005), The New America: A Drove(2007), The Mystic'south Smiling ~ A Play in 3 Acts (2007), Vanity of Vanities(2011), A Time to Love in Tehran(2015), Little Hometown, America (2020); A Time to Forget in Eastward Berlin (2022), and Conquergood & the Centre of the Intelligible Mystery of Beingness (2023).
Forthcoming: The Endless Endeavor of Excellence.
He has a B.A. in English language, an Grand.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was built-in in Texas in 1979.
You can follow the author on Facebook @ cg.fewston – where he has 470,000+ followers
A Time TO FORGET IN Eastward BERLIN
BREW Book Excellence Award Winner
Brew Readers' Selection Honour Winner
"A spellbinding tale of love and espionage fix nether the looming shadow of the Berlin Wall in 1975… A mesmerising read full of charged eroticism."
~ Ian Skewis, Associate Editor for Bloodhound Books, & writer of best-selling novelA Murder of Crows (2017)
"An engrossing story of secret espionage… a testament to the lifestyle encountered in Eastward Berlin at the height of the Cold War."
~ Lone Star Literary Life Magazine
"There is no improve way for readers interested in Deutschland's history and the dilemma and cultures of the 2 Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such every bit this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals' love, human relationship, and options and expands them confronting the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided."
~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer,Midwest Book Review
"A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of dear and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold State of war spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston's elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time."
~ Matthew Harffy, prolific writer & best-selling historical fiction writer of the "Bernicia Chronicles" series
"Vivid, nuanced, and poetic…"
"Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters."
"At that place's a lot to blot in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded."
~ The Prairies Volume Review
LITTLE HOMETOWN, AMERICA
"Readers ofTheCatcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, disquisitional inspection of life that makesPetty Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of gimmicky American life and civilization."
"Fewston employs a literary device called a 'frame narrative' which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-film result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories announced equally parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways."
~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
"The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello."
"In this manner, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the 'purity' of art, the 'corrupting' influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships."
~ Lone Star Literary Life Magazine
GOLD Winner in the 2020 Homo Relations Indie Volume Awards for Contemporary Realistic Fiction
FINALIST in the SOUTHWEST REGIONAL FICTION category of the 14th Almanac National Indie Excellence 2020 Awards (NIEA)
"Fewston'due south lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-sometime man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings backside babyhood memories."
"The novel's focus on determinative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator's lived experiences come up across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral."
~ The BookLife Prize
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Source: https://cgfewston.me/2017/11/28/the-stories-of-john-cheever-1978-by-john-cheever-the-creation-of-fiction-as-art/
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