The most compelling narrator is the one who is led to writing as a liberation from ghosts, atonement for guilt or feelings of defeat. The life of John cheever he was soon engulfed in that sense of defeat. If the young Cheever was already a problematic teenager, the paternal abandonment did nothing but enhance an adolescence and youth on the tightrope of rebellion and nihilism.
All that would end up being the sustenance of many of his novels and stories. A crude existentialism runs through everything, with the contradiction of trying to trivialize transcendental aspects of the characters while at the same time intuiting the heavy idea of the search for some foothold to remain linked to the world.
Another formula for this type of case of writers conditioned by their circumstances would be the case of Bukowski and its dirty realism. But while in Cheever that lucid glow of humanity emerges between the alienation of the slums and the characters who wander without many chores and few pretensions, Bukowski becomes the master of doom, always assumed that all is truly lost.
To approach Cheever is to rediscover the dimension of the story. From a short narrative, a much larger universe can be accommodated than in any novel (Returning to comparisons, the nickname of «Chekhov of the suburbs ”comes to him that neither painted Cheever, only that the temporal and cultural distance, as well as the disparate social contexts between the Russian writer and this American cause a very different scenery)
Top 3 best John Cheever novels
John Cheever stories
The literary, human level and the narrative cadence of Cheever's stories have something very special. That a compilation of stories was made with the Pulitzer Prize for novels back in 1979 is an act of adapting the prize to the work.
A kind of reverence to assume that the composition, the mosaic, the sum of stories and perspectives can be considered a novel with the same validity as one of more standard structure. Cheever found in New York (like so many other creators of yesterday and today) the universal city, the perfect environment to have a cosmos in the sum of its blocks, with its suburbs and its upper-class areas.
New York is a story and a novel (and thousands of movies). Probably because of this consideration of this great city as a protagonist that suckles so many offspring, this recognition of a work of stories and a novel at the same time was considered appropriate.
Chronicle of the whapshot
The decline in its integrity, social and personal, becomes a great source of argument from which to raise the levels of misery that human beings can reach.
A melancholic background floods this novel, a melancholy that prevents per se from raising any hint of happiness among the whapsot or any other inhabitant of the lesser city of St. Botolphs.
The sadness of what is gone or what has never been is what he has, prevents the completion of any good plan because it puts the protagonists in a complicated limbo between the splendid past and the insurmountable sense of loss.
Leander, the patriarch of the family, Sarah as the adorable wife of scrupulous morals, young Moses and Coverly as the only candidates to escape the suffocating melancholy of no return that Aunt Honora perfectly embodies, strict and convinced that things still They must be as before, when that before is only a shadow that leads to despair.
This looks like paradise
For an author of disenchantment like Cheever, this title may seem paradoxical. And it is. It is true that in it some hope is finally distilled or a slight hint of commitment to love as an argument.
But Lemuel Sears represents the human who feels old, beaten on time by his time. There is not much happiness in that feeling.
But it is true that in the end there is talk of sublimation, of how Lemuel Sears may one day decide to fight a little against himself and get up with more energy, look for a cause to fight for, let himself be seduced by a possible love as if his heart I could still redouble in adolescent plan. Not all is lost in perdition ...
I think Bullet Park should be listed there...