Cheever isn’t selling as well as I thought it would, but neither is Hiding Man or other high priced hardcovers. I guess people would rather fill their gas tanks than buy a good literary biography.
To really know a man you should probably look into his diary, the one in his head, but in this case, you can read the short story The Ocean and find a million reasons why a man shouldn’t write his thoughts down. Eventually you’ll be called on the carpet for what you’ve written. It’s not important who the narrator is, it’s Cheever, you know that already. The wife Cora is trying to poison our narrator, and we discover it at the very moment he does, she’s gotten hold of lighter fluid and has sprinkled it on his salad. There is an immediate fear that runs through the reader’s larynx when we find out a page or so later that our hero will be home for a long time to come, he’s just been downsized. Cora will have all day long to hammer home those final coffin nails. Cheever mixes a fear of losing your nine-to-five spot, which always makes a man feel like shit, but when he realizes his wife also finds him redundant…well…the game is on.
There is a white-knuckle intensity to this man’s actions, his voice is nervous, and he is especially out of his mind when he tries to bribe his way back into the work force. Once at home, he dodges his wife’s tenacious efforts send him off to a dirt nap, and sees that she may not be trying to poison him after all, sadly, she is losing her mind. She has been living in a world that is disconnected from reality, a different reality from the narrator, who was in the work force for so long that he doesn’t know his housekeeper takes a nap at the same time Cora does each day.
Cheever knows this house is a sinkhole for the story, so he glides seamlessly to the narrator’s daughter, who is living in the city – a foreign place for this man to visit. She wants nothing to do with him, even when he threatens to take her allowance away. Her significant other is just as lazy as she is, Cheever blames the generation, which I can assume is the 60′s. There is a clash between the stiff upper lip that comes from doing your job, and providing for a family and the freedom of youth. It’s amazing that I’ve only now discovered this great writer.
-JR
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