Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cheever, the daughter of novelist and short story writer John Cheever (1912--1982), blends literary analysis and memoir in this transcendent look at her father's most influential works. Married with three children, John was a closeted gay man who battled alcoholism for most of his life. Despite his prolific output--he published more than 100 stories in the New Yorker between 1935 and 1982, plus three mid-career novels--his family was burdened by financial worries until the success of the novel Falconer in 1977 and his Pulitzer Prize--winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, in 1978. Those stories, though celebrated, plundered the family's personal lives and frequently savaged their neighbors and friends; Cheever writes that her father was "a wise man on the page and an idiot at the dinner table," never quite able to extend the empathy he showed his characters to the people in his life. John's emotional struggles, meanwhile, went unexamined within the family, "but what was left unsaid... often leaked out into the pages of the New Yorker." Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever's narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It's equal parts wrenching and edifying. Agents: Andrew Wylie and Rebecca Nagel, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Who owns a story? As an author, teacher, speaker, and--most importantly in this instance--daughter, Susan Cheever aims to answer this question in a remarkable book about her father, the legendary novelist and short story writer John Cheever. Combining biography, memoir, literary criticism, social history, and more, this book is sui generis. In a prefatory "Note to the Reader," Susan calls it a "sequel of sorts" to her 1984 book Home Before Dark, pointing out, though, that that book was about her father's life, while her new volume is about his work. This book stands on its own however, as it deftly describes how life--her father's and their family's--informed the novelist's remarkable stories about daily life in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Westchester, and old New England villages. Many of the stories were first published in the New Yorker mid-20th-century; in 1979, due in part to the persistence of publisher Robert Gottlieb, the great anthology The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize. Many of the stories by "the Chekhov of the suburbs" became kind of bible for Matthew Weiner, creator of the hit mid-2000s TV series Mad Men, and Cheever's book insightfully examines where these iconic works came from in her father's mind. VERDICT This illuminating book fills in many blanks about a troubled and troubling life. It includes the full text of six of the many Cheever stories referenced here, which is value-added. Recommended for all libraries.--Ellen Gilbert
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The daughter of the acclaimed fiction writer revisits her father's life and work many years after his death. Forty years afterHome Before Dark (1984), her compassionate memoir of her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever--herself an accomplished author--returns with deeper perspective on their relationship. Her earlier book first disclosed that her father lived a double life--suburban family man with secret gay encounters--revealed through journals she read after his 1982 death that were later published in abridged form in 1991. In graceful prose, her latest work probes deeper, examining their relationship and his internal landscape through his short stories, over 200 published mostly in theNew Yorker from the late 1930s onward. By turns affectionate and admiring but also clear-sighted and unsparing, she focuses primarily on six of his most memorable stories, including "The Five-Forty-Eight" (1954), "Reunion" (1962), and "The Swimmer" (1964), all included in the appendix. She reveals how their daily family lives often anchored his fiction, with family members serving as character inspiration. "The little girls in his stories were not me, he insisted--although they looked like me and thought like me and did what I did," writes Cheever. "The confusion between life and art created a painful tension for him as well as for us, his subjects and family, who were first exploited and then caught up in a process that--he often reminded us--was greater and more noble than our hurt feelings." Regarding his hidden sexuality, she also brings modern insight to a subject that was considered so taboo at that time. "Did living a lie help him create the lie that is the truth of fiction? The best lies, as he well knew, are the ones that sail closest to the truth. The best fiction is fiction that seems to be real." An eloquent and fully immersive portrait of a renowned author. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
