Why I Love John Cheever
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have surmised that, of all the books I’ve read this year, one of them seems to be taking quite some time.
That would be The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of John Cheever’s best short fiction from 1946 to 1978.
I started this book in April. I’ve started and finished many other books in the months between, but this one remains unfinished, five months later.
For this week, at least. I’m less than 100 pages from the end now, with some of Cheever’s best stories still to come.
Why, of all books, has this one taken me so long?
Perhaps it’s the length. With 800 pages of small print, this is a big book.
Maybe it’s Cheever’s writing style. I’ve performed an unscientific1 breakdown of the amount of narrative (which tends to be quite dense) to dialogue (which tends to be read faster) in the book and I figure the divide is about 70% narrative to 30% dialogue. That’s a big disparity, and something that few modern authors could pull off and manage to get published. Assuming this breakdown is correct that means that the book is 560 pages of narrative and 240 of dialogue.
It could be neither of those things, or a mix of both. Maybe I’ve just been savoring the book, devouring one or two stories at a time and allowing them to sink in before moving on.
No matter the reason, John Cheever is a brilliant writer. Here’s one of my favorite passages, and an example of why I’ve enjoyed reading this book so much:
“There are some Americans who, although their fathers emigrated from the old world three centuries ago, never seem to have quite completed the voyage and I am one of these. I stand, figuratively, with one wet foot on Plymouth Rock, looking with some delicacy, not into a formidable and challenging wilderness but onto a half-finished civilization embracing glass towers, oil derricks, suburban continents, and abandoned movie houses and wondering why, in this most prosperous, equitable and accomplished world–where even the cleaning women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time–everyone should seem to be so disappointed?” – “The Death of Justina”
Highly recommended.
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