#cheever

"But out of the window he could see the blue sky above the trees of the square and he was easily charmed with the appearance of the world. How could anything go wrong in such a paradise?"

“Before Air-Conditioning”

“The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting ‘Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!’ ” Read more.

“Under Construction”

“On the Fourth of July weekend, we got up onto the old West Side Elevated Highway (closed but not yet demolished) and went walking past the new World Trade Center towers (brutalist but not yet tragic) and didn’t see another person in any direction. Romantically deserted vistas were what I wanted in a city when I was twenty-one.” Read more.

“Tiny Jumpers Rule at the Double Dutch Summer Classic”

“The sound of taut ropes lashing on concrete at short intervals is, to me, the sound of summer.” Read more.

“New York Local”

“So I made our local dinner. Aside from the spices and the olive oil—which we allowed ourselves under what is called a ‘Marco Polo exemption,’ common to localism—everything in the dinner hailed from, or had at least seen its first or last days, within the city limits of New York.” Read more.

“The Swimmer: Manhattan Edition”

About 20 miles south of Boston, under a big maple near a white clapboard church, John Cheever is buried next to his parents and brother. He’s also buried under an accretion of myth and myth-busting. A restaurant on the edge of the cemetery, just yards from the family plot, calls itself the Cheever Tavern. Advertising a “tasteful setting,” it invokes the great writer’s mid-1960s public persona as…