Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. Knopf. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. (Library of America, No. 188.) Library of America. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Complete Novels. (Library of America, No. 189.) Library of America. March 2009.

What happened is that it continued to decline. In the lurching stock market of literary fame, John Cheever’s has been fading for decades. “Who is reading him now?” the New York Times asked recently—in the course of an article on the television show “Desperate Housewives.” Times media critic David Carr refers almost apologetically in his recent memoir to having been born “into a John Cheever novel… a suburban idyll where any mayhem was hidden,” using the allusion as shorthand for the unremarkable and banal. This God- and sin-haunted man and the writing he produced so meticulously over the course of a half-century have come to stand, in our collective literary consciousness, for dullness, complacency, and an utter lack of relevance.

There are reasons for this. Many aspects of Cheever’s work—the domesticity, recurrently Christian vernacular, and near-complete absence of nonwhite actors—sound quaint to the contemporary ear. On a deeper level, the whole tradition of lyrical realism, of which Cheever, along with John Updike, is the quintessential postwar avatar, has increasingly come to be regarded as metaphysically suspect. In a thoughtful New York Review of Books essay, the novelist Zadie Smith recently wondered if a form where “even the mini-traumas of a middle-class life are given the high lyrical treatment” has exhausted itself. Smith sees lyrical realism at an “anxiety crossroads where a community in recent crisis—the Anglo-American liberal middle class—meets a literary form [the novel] in long-term crisis.” This is not a favorable climate for a writer whose primary audience was readers of the New Yorker, who celebrated his Yankee seafaring lineage, and who held, to the end of his days, an abiding faith in the power of traditional narrative.

This spring’s double-barreled canonization—Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, firmly in the contemporary blow-by-blow biographical style, plus two volumes of Cheever ensconced in the Library of America—at least allows us finally to pose the question: Was Cheever great?
(more…)

Unstoppable: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Dear Husband,” (Ecco, $24.99) is savage, poetic and ruthless. Oates deals with characters and themes she has often covered before — violent men, desperate women, lives scarred by alcohol and poverty — but her touch has never been surer, her insights never more piercing. At least one of these stories (”Landfill”) can break your heart, and several of the others, astonishingly, are among the best things she’s ever done. Oates’s naysayers, who are legion, will someday come to accept that we are witnessing the steady unfolding of one of the towering careers in American letters.

New Kid: Wells Tower’s debut collection has generated effulgent praise, which is puzzling. “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” (Farrar Straus Giroux, $24) is moderately engaging, but in the end there’s not a lot here: some light, but not much heat. Tower has a hipster’s weakness for the showily offbeat; his characters come at their lives from odd angles, as if shyly proud of their eccentricities. If this book, with its mixture of the deadpan and the earnest, the ironic and the whimsical, were somehow to emerge from a time capsule, future generations would have an anthropologically perfect example of American fiction of the 2000s subgenre Quirky Young Misfit.

Across the Sea: “The Thing Around Your Neck” (Knopf, $24.95) is the third book from acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who deploys her calm, descriptive prose to portray women in Nigeria and America who are forced to match their wits against threats ranging from marauding guerrillas to microwave ovens. Within its somewhat narrow range — the men are all feckless brutes, the women invariably resourceful and spunky — these stories are haunting. The devastating final piece, “The Headstrong Historian,” seems to carry the whole history of a continent in its bones: tragic, defiant, revelatory.

Love Slav: Reviewers find it difficult to resist comparing Aleksandar Hemon to Nabokov, since both men are expatriates whose preternatural facility in their second, acquired language seems shadowed by the ghostly overtones of their first. The stories in “Love and Obstacles” (Riverhead, $25.95) are intricate and droll, with tricky narrative rhythms that only occasionally stumble over self-consciously literary language. Like Adichie, Hemon gets well-earned mileage out of the reliable trope of the foreigner encountering the excesses of American culture. His narrative inventiveness and the sardonic twist of his humor set this collection above the crowd.

Weird Science: Kevin Wilson’s fiction feels like the work of a species entirely distinct from Aleksandar Hemon. For Slavic soul, substitute Southern anomie; in place of elegant continental modernism, put scattershot pop-culture mash-ups. Hemon writes characters who hate college football and cheeseburgers; Wilson depicts a puppy-love homosexual relationship that plays out within the mayhem of the video game “Mortal Kombat.” “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” (Ecco/HarperPerennial; paperback, $13.99) gets under your skin, though; Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.

Same Bright Lights: For a quarter-century now, Jay McInerney has been telling fundamentally the same story: Innocent newcomer to the neon jungle gains the world — or at least a book contract, a bespoke suit and a gorgeous girlfriend — only to lose his soul. “How It Ended” (Knopf, $25.95) presents a dozen amusing but ultimately self-indulgent variations on that theme. The short story is perhaps not the best display case for McInerney’s gifts. His characters need narrative time for their world-weary carapaces to crack, revealing hidden depths and vulnerabilities; in the shorter format, their sardonic defense mechanisms come across as shallow and bitchy.

Downtown: Mary Gaitskill’s career hits a speed bump with “Don’t Cry” (Pantheon, $23.95), the oddly subdued follow-up to her breakout novel, “Veronica.” These new stories sport a fillip of the surreal and a dash of riot-girl sass, but the prose feels simultaneously vague and fussed-over, in that portentous MFA-workshop way. The narratives, which often depict damaged or unhappy women bumping up against indifference or cruelty, seem unfocused and tired; at least two feature long descriptions of dream sequences, a sure sign of authorial laziness.

Uptown: If Mary Gaitskill is your impossibly cool older sister who wears black and smokes unfiltered cigarettes, then Caitlin Macy is your stylish and wildly popular younger sister who just drove off with the homecoming king. Macy’s fiction is all reader-friendly surfaces and sheen, and “Spoiled” (Random House, $24) comprises nine chronicles of preppy women gone off the rails. The ruthless acuity of Macy’s social observations puts “Spoiled” a notch — a slender notch, mind you — above those books with pink covers and martini glasses. Most telling sentence: “The woman quoted amicably that oft-repeated epigram about nannies in New York, that the good ones always got passed along.” Oh, right, that oft-repeated epigram.

From The Washington Post (July 8, 2009)