#johncheever

John Cheever really liked Italy

A long time ago, I read an article explaining that Stephen King is a great writer without being a good writer. Great because he puts everything on the page. Not good because he's loaded with cliches, doesn't know how to end a book and gets all "hello fellow kids" when he's dealing with a character who isn't a baby boomer.

One thing that intrigues me about Cheever is just how much of himself ends up in the page. This can be a drawback (like how many stories am I going to read about white dudes in the suburbs?) but it also feels like I'm on a journey with the man.

And I didn't even need to google to know that he spent some time in Italy and it became his ideal land. Still I googled and yes, he's very much into Italy.

So the last story in this collection (The Trouble with Marcie Flint) is about a woman dealing with the fact that her husband took off to Italy without telling her when he'd be back, only to kick him out of the house when he finally returns, leading him to go back to Italy, this story is about a divorced man living in Italy.

A great deal of this story is description. Repeatedly the characters are either enchanted by Italy of vaguely discomfited. They are getting robbed or they are failing to adapt.

Streeter is the main character but he's not the only one who gets a perspective. He's in Italy enjoying the beauty and trying to learn the language in order to adapt, but he's not an immigrant. He's an expat.

There are comedic scenes of him going through teachers. One teacher won't stop reading Pinocchio at him. The other teacher wants to talk about her terrible fiance. A third teacher seems flirtatious, enough for him to try something and get screamed at.

But finally there's a teacher who actually is good at teaching Italian, mostly because she had to learn it herself as she's from Iowa. The last part of the story turns to her and her son and her uncle who wants to take them both home.

The uncle scenes contrast with Streeter due to the fact that he's got an image of Italy as a place that you take a vacation in. So he does the tourist things and gets mugged on his way to her place. There's rather a wonderful way that you can contrast the characters simply in their viewpoints of Italy.

So the climax is the confrontation where Streeter has faded from the protagonist to an audience member between the Uncle and his Italan teacher with the son so out of step with Italy that there's no way that he's staying.

But the teacher - well her past in a small town in Iowa was hell. So there's a new contrast. Streeter is in Italy because he's divorced and he's romanticizing Italy. HIs Italian teacher had such a crap time in her town that she's never going back.

In America, we have a couple cities that serve as the "Everyone belongs because no one belongs here really" but for someone who truly suffered as a youth, not even New York or Los Angeles could be far enough away.

This is one of those stories that I think I'll be reading again. Some day. I enjoyed it a great deal.

Better. This one is better. It also feels very meta or self-parodying as John Cheever takes a break from his usual bad marriages and drunks of Shady Hill to tell a story about the Crutchmans, a perfectly happy couple with children who grow up healthy.

Two things before I go on. First I think that the reason why George on Seinfeld thinks that having an affair is adult is a generation gap thing. The generation gap didn't end with the 60s when all the hippies decided to go corporate.

I know. I know. I'm going to keep talking about tensions between Baby Boomers and "The Greatest Generation" with the "greatest generation" being a bunch of fuck ups who were scarred by a war that they had to approach with toxic positivity after it was over. The Great War. The big one. The best years of our lives. And oh yeah, no one is talking about it because they went through some fucking trauma.

So George thinking that an affair is adult is because the "greatest generation" was the last generation that thought that it was stuck in their marriages, so of course they had affairs. And that dumbass question "Why don't marriages last?" has an easy answer. THey don't have to. No one has to stay in a miserable marriage. So the Baby Boomers just got divorced and after the Baby Boom we can experiment. Group marriages, polyamory, monogamish, cuckolding, key parties, weird religious culty marriages, etc.

There was a second thing but I forgot it.

So this story is funny because Cheever has a narrator wondering what the fuck is wrong with this couple. When is the other shoe going to drop? Like maybe the war will tear them apart. Maybe she makes too much money. Maybe he will get drunk.

There's also a part where everyone wonders why neither husband nor wife has an affair. Yeah, that greatest generation cheated fits here (but most of the Cheever stories have infidelity and drinking). Were they prudes? Were they monogamous?

And their children - well they had some problems but they turned out ok. Sure the daughter ran off with a gardener's son and was pregnant when she married and the son was held back a year, but overall they were fine.

This is a slight story, which makes sense because it's a one joke story where the major point is that this is a happy couple so what the hell are they doing in a Cheever story? But it was what I needed after that damn bus story.

What the hell, Cheever

In a reverse of the SOP of this blog, I'm going to take a bit from the Wikipedia on the story collection that is named for this story.

"If there is any weakness in these stories, it is Cheever's reliance on sudden, fortuitous escapes from or alleviations of his character's difficulties. The crisis in these people's live are real and painful, but the ends of the crisis come so abruptly, and in some cases, so implausibly, that it may be hard for the reader to feel their seriousness" - Lynne Waldeland

So this one is weird because you think that it's going to be some freaky morality tale about a man who lives in the suburbs and starts stealing from his neighbors in order to keep his business going. He mentions his mother hates his wife. He has a fight with his wife and almost leaves her but she comes back to him. He notes that his father showed up when he was a kid and took him to a burlesque theater. His father was a drunk, so was his father responsible for his strange habit of stealing money at parties and trying to break into houses? Why did his kid give him a ladder?

Unlike the previous story which is a slight story, this one actually ratchets up the tension and then...he gets his job back and he does one final break-in to give one family back their money.

Yeah. So I kind of made a point about the previous story being about the rich being cushioned in their bubbles, but this is about a suburban white guy who gets away with crimes because who would suspect a suburban white guy of stealing from them.

And then he gets the money back to the people he robbed and everything is fine.

I am tempted to think that this story has a major theme about privilege and suburban life and that the ending is really genius. Still it feels like a wet fart of an ending.