The Stories of John Cheever

By John Cheever

This collection of short stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979.

John Cheever's stories are cruel and mean and nasty and occasionally slightly amusing. Very rarely do they end happily. Mostly they are about ordinary yet creepy men and the women who like to make their lives a misery. According to the Wikipedia article about Cheever his most famous stories are "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Enormous Radio", and "The Swimmer." The only one I was previously familiar with was "The Swimmer" which was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster and which I saw on TV as a kid.
In "Goodbye, My Brother", a family gets together at their summer home on the beach. One brother is a spoilsport who always has some critical comment to make. His brother gets fed up with his sourpuss brother and clonks him on the head with a chunk of wood.
In "The Enormous Radio", an old radio gets replaced with a new radio. It has such an acute receiver that it picks up the conversations of the other tenants in the apartment building. The wife listens in to these conversations and is shocked and dismayed at all the shameful things going on in the superficially happy homes of her neighbors. Her husband chides her, pointing out her own foibles.
In "The Swimmer", (which doesn't appear til almost the end of the book) a man is attending (or thinks he is attending) a pool party when he decides to swim home using all the neighborhood pools via a route he calls the Lucinda River in honor of his wife Lucinda. He does swim home but when he gets there the house is abandoned.

I found these stories interesting and engaging, even if they are a rather twisted view of ordinary people. I didn't find the book hard to read, even though I don't care for short stories for the most part.

New Words:
Fitch: Polecat; dark brown mustelid of woodlands of Eurasia that gives off an unpleasant odor when threatened. "Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink." From "The Enormous Radio".
Vitiated: Marred, made imperfect, corrupted. "Hills blocked off the delicate, the vitiated New Hampshire landscape, with its omnipresence of ruin, but every few miles a tributary of the Merrimack opened a broad valley, with elms, farms, and stone fences." From "The Summer Farmer".
Plangent: Loud and resounding. "He mowed, cultivated, and waxed angry about the price of scratch feed, and at that instant when the plangent winds of Labor Day began to sound he hung up his blunted scythe to rust in the back hall, where the kerosene was kept, and happily shifted his interest to the warm apartments of New York." From "The Summer Farmer."
Snath: The long wooden shaft of a scythe. "Then the wet wind climbed the hill behind them, and Paul, taking one hand off the snath, straightened his back." From "The Summer Farmer."
Copore sano: Latin for "sound body". "They were people who emphasized copore sano unduly, Baxter thought, and they shouldn't leave Clarissa alone in the cottage." From "The Chaste Clarissa".
Sumptuary laws: Laws intended to restrain or limit the expenditure of citizens in apparel, food, furniture, etc.; laws which regulate the prices of commodities and the wages of labor; laws which forbid or restrict the use of certain articles, as of luxurious apparel. Sumptuary means regulating or controlling expenditure or personal behavior. "He dressed -- like the rest of us -- as if he admitted the existence of sumptuary laws." From "The Five-Forty-Eight".
Banlieue: French for outskirts of a city. "I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill."
Parablendeum: a kind of plastic wrap; a word that may have been created by the author. "I went to work right after the war for a parablendeum manufacturer, and seemed on the way to making this my life." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Schuhplattler: A traditional folk dance from Bavaria and Austria. "It seemed to me that if it had been my destiny to be a Russian ballet dancer, or to make art jewelry, or to paint Schuhplattler dancers on bureau drawers and landscapes on clamshells and live in some very low-tide place like Provincetown, I wouldn't have known a queerer bunch of men and women than I knew in the parablendeum industry, and I decided to strike out on my own." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Riggish: Wanton. "I was thinking sadly about my beginnings -- about how I was made by a riggish couple in a midtown hotel after a six-course dinner with wines, and my mother told me so many times that if she hadn't drunk so many Old-Fashioneds before that famous dinner I would still be unborn on a star." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Gymkhana: A meet at which riders and horses display a range of skills and aptitudes. "I'm having a little gymkhana next month, and I want your children to ride in it." From "The Bus to St. James".
Soubrettes: A soubrette is a stock female character in opera or theater; in theater it is a vain, girlish, flirty comedy character. "On Saturdays after the movies they go into one of those bars called Harry's or Larry's of Jerry's, where the walls are covered with autographed photographs of unknown electric-guitar players and unknown soubrettes, to eat bacon and eggs and talk baseball and play American records on the jukebox." From "The Bella Lingua".
Upzoning: The process, often controversial, of changing the zoning in an area, usually to allow greater density or commercial use. Sometimes the term is used to mean the opposite -- changing the zoning in a broad area to limit growth and density. "The Wrysons' civic activities were confined to upzoning, but they were very active in this field, and if you were invited to their house for cocktails, the chances were that you would be asked to sign an upzoning petition before you got away." From "The Wrysons".
Rubato: To play with a flexible tempo. "He threw the tempo out the window and played it rubato from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity -- of everything it was Beethoven's greatness not to know." From "The Country Husband".
Neurasthenics: Neurasthenia is an old-fashioned unspecific word usually meaning weakness of the nervous system or nervous exhaustion. Not a phrase that is used much these days. "They took so many hot baths that she could not understand why they were not neurasthenics." From "Clementina".
Hoardings: A temporary wooden fence around a building or structure under construction or repair; a billboard. "All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we -- you and I -- shall build." From "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear".
Laconic: Crisp, brief and to the point. "In closing -- in closing, that is, for this afternoon (I have to go to the dentist and then have my hair cut), I would like to consider the career of my laconic old friend Royden Blake." From "A Miscellany of Character That Will Not Appear."
Contumacious: Wilfully obstinate; stubbornly disobedient. "It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious." From "The Ocean".
Suffragan: An assistant or subordinate bishop of a diocese. "Should he ask the suffragan bishop to reassess the Ten Commandments, to include in their prayers some special reference to the feelings of magnanimity and love that follow sexual engorgements?" From "Marito in Città".
Tufa: A type of stone. "The tufa and pepperoni and the bitter colors of the lichen that takes root in the walls and roofs are no part of the consciousness of an American, even if he has lived for years, as Bascomb had, surrounded by this bitterness." From "The World of Apples".
Orison: Prayer. "The man's face was idiotic -- doped, drugged, and ugly -- and yet, standing in his unsavory orisons, he seemed to old Bascomb angelic, armed with a flaming sword that might conquer banality and smash the glass of custom." From "The World of Apples".
Lordosis: An exaggerated inward curvature of the spine; also called swayback. "Her back and front were prominent and there was a memorable curve to her spine that could have been a cruel corset or the beginnings of lordosis." From "The Jewels of the Cabots".