Guest Post: On Reading John Cheever as a Young Man

When my friend "Z" said he liked my recent (7/22/11) post on John Cheever, and had read a lot of Cheever at one time, I invited him to write a guest post on this author. What follows is his thought-provoking and vivid take on Cheever, in the context of "Z"'s own life, with some comments on what Cheever's work shows us on that so important but seldom openly discussed topic, social class. Thanks, Z!

From "Z":
I began reading John Cheever’s work when I returned to New York after living in New Orleans for a short while. I was glad to be back in New York even though I was broke and a bit dispirited. I’d just gotten a job at a news-photo agency, and I was living with my parents at the time. Riding into the city on the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station, I would fantasize I was one of Cheever’s characters who lived in the suburbs and rode the train into the city. However, I understood that I lived in the wrong kind of suburbs – the fairly typical ‘middle-class’ one that might be best characterized as Levittown Lite – not quite row after row of identical box homes filling up the landscape, but since my family lived in what was called a “model home”, it was close enough.

There was also the issue of arriving at and departing from Penn Station. As anyone who was alive at the time could tell you, it was a criminal travesty that the city demolished the original structure in 1963. It was an irreplaceable architectural and cultural loss. What I remember of the new Penn Station as a young man was seeing drunken New York Ranger fans after a hockey game finished at Madison Square Garden – which sat on top of the now subterranean Station like some hideous toad – running amok through the ghastly narrow corridors of the Station. Worse was when they boarded the same train as me, full of fan-fueled testosterone and shoving horrible hot dogs and other noxious substances passing for food into their gaping mouths, ready to vomit.

No, this was not the aptly-named Grand Central of Cheever-land, where, albeit similarly inebriated beings also lurched onto the trains – the Metro North (even the name bespoke of its connection to the city unlike the regionally distinct “Long Island Rail Road”) going to the suburbs of which he wrote: leafy green neighborhoods where none of the houses were identical, and many considerably older than the “model home” of my adolescence. These passengers might have been as drunk as those hockey fans, but they held their liquor.

And there it is – the inescapable, the big unsaid in American culture: the issue of class. Not ‘class’ as in ‘classy’, but the real issue of class – the kind which gives lie to the American narrative of equality and opportunity. It was as big a divide as I can remember, seeing those people – the kind Cheever wrote about in his magnificent short stories and the worthy “Wapshot Chronicle.” Those people. You know, them. WASPs. I forgot exactly when I learned of this word and what it meant, but I came to know what it really meant in college. I attended a small, private East Coast one (how and why I ended up there is another story for another time), where I first met people with names like “Prescott” and “Suzanne,” and who played squash but never looked particularly sweaty afterward. They had of course been going to private schools their whole lives, and so by this time, they had figured out the academic and social game a long time ago. I was the interloper, the kid from Long (hard ‘g’) Island (the South Shore of course), not from the City or its leafy green suburbs to the north.

What was it about them that fascinated me, and why did I find similar characters in Cheever’s novels equally fascinating at the time? Besides the quality of his writing and his careful observations of what actually lay beneath those well-worn exteriors, looking back, I can now perhaps attribute it to a perverse kind of longing to belong – a not altogether unexpected desire stemming from my status of being seen as a “stranger from a different shore” despite my having been born here, but also something else: a budding scorn for what I perceived to be their conducting their public lives with a certain style that has been named as displaying “class,” but which kept the rest of us looking in and left out.

I haven’t read Cheever since that time, but I recall an old joke from the Marx Brothers which seems to be a good summary of his work, and why I liked it so much:
“Say I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you, by the name of Emanuel Ravelli.”
- - But I am Emanuel Ravelli!
“Well, no wonder you look like him!”

Difficult Decisions about Thinning One's Book Collection

I have written (4/1/10) about the struggle to know when to keep books and when (because of space issues, mostly) to get rid of (give away) books. I had this discussion with my friend and professional colleague P when I visited her recently; her house is crammed with books and journals and she doesn’t have enough space to put them all. She said that she knew she should thin her collection, and was making some halfhearted efforts to do so. But as a prolific academic writer, she uses her books more regularly than most of us do. Many of us say about books or other items that we keep, despite not having used them for years, that “you never know when you might need them.” In her case, this statement is actually apt. Despite that, I urged her to trim her collection a bit, saying that there must be books and journals that she really would never use again. She said she would try, but clearly she was hesitant. Soon after my visit, P let me know in a humorous email that not only once but twice the day after my visit, she had needed to find a passage or reference and had been able to find them in books she hadn’t looked at for years. And then, ironically, she suddenly found she needed an article that happened to be in the one journal she had managed to get rid of, as she seldom used material in the subdiscipline it represented. This matter of deciding what to keep and what to let go is a tough one!

Designated “Highly Recommended”

Readers may have noticed that I occasionally – very occasionally – end a review post with the words “Highly Recommended.” This phrase indicates not just that I liked the book or thought it was good – many other books reviewed meet that standard – but that I found the book particularly outstanding. It reached out and grabbed me, pulled me in; it was an exciting discovery, a “wow” experience. Below I list the books (all fiction) that I have recently designated as “Highly Recommended,” as well as a few that I should have so designated (but didn’t, because I wasn’t yet consciously and consistently using this term for the very best books). Because I posted my list of “Ten Favorite Books of 2010” on 12/9/10, I only include here books that I have reviewed since that time. The dates indicate when I posted about each book.

12/12/10 “The Imperfectionists” by Tom Rachman
12/21/10 “The Bigness of the World: Stories” by Lori Ostlund
12/24/10 “Selected Stories” by William Trevor
12/28/10 “World and Town” by Gish Jen
1/15/11 “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Stories” by Robin Black
1/28/11 “The Empty Family: Stories” by Colm Toibin
3/2/11 “Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia” by Anne Raeff
4/9/11 “Marry or Burn: Stories” by Valerie Trueblood
4/16/11 “Seven Loves” by Valerie Trueblood
4/22/11 “Binocular Vision: Stories” by Edith Pearlman
5/1/11 “Swim Back to Me: Stories” by Ann Packer
5/17/11 “Emily, Alone” by Stewart O'Nan
5/21/11 “Pulse: Stories” by Julian Barnes
6/20/11 “The Lemon Table: Stories” by Julian Barnes
7/14/11 “The Bostons: Stories” by Carolyn Cooke

A few points about the above list:
1. Fifteen “Wow” books in a little under eight months is pretty good!
2. I am surprised to see how many of these books -- 10 out of the 15 on the lists -- are collections of short stories. As I wrote on 7/24/11, despite novels’ having always been my first reading love, I seem these days to be reading and appreciating short stories more and more. I don’t know if this tendency is a coincidence, something temporary, or something more long-range.
3. Six of these books are by writers I was already familiar with and whose new books I watch out for; nine of them are either first books, or by authors I was not familiar with before reading the current book. I am pleased with this, because it means that while I honor and continue to read and enjoy the work of established writers, I am continuing to “discover” new authors, and because it indicates that the state of fiction is still healthy, with more and more new writers being published.

"Agewise," by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

I don’t usually pick up a book intending only to read certain selections, but I did so with “Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Margaret Morganroth Gullette. The topic of ageism is important (and of increasing relevance to my Boomer generation); the author is a scholar but writes in a way accessible to the general reader. I am sure the rest of the book is interesting, but what caught my attention and what I read were two chapters with literary connections. The first is “The Mystery of Carolyn Heilbrun’s Suicide: Fear of Aging, Ageism, and the ‘Duty to Die.’” Readers of this blog may remember that Carolyn Heilbrun is a feminist literary scholar whom I greatly admire (see my post of 7/14/10), and whose feminist detective novels, written under the pen name of Amanda Cross, are also wonderful; I was very saddened to learn of her suicide in 2003. Gullette feels, as the title indicates, that Heilbrun, despite being only 77 and being in good health, with many admirable achievements, greatly admired, with a loving family and many friends, felt that it was time for her to die; she had retired from Columbia University under difficult circumstances, had lost her interest to some extent in reading and writing, was subject to depression, and -- most notably, to Gullette -- felt that she was becoming somewhat invisible. The author theorizes that once women of Heilbrun’s generation had, with difficulty, been able to join the workforce and use their minds and talents, they became invested in doing so, and were/are at a loss when retiring, even more so than men (although Gullette doesn’t explain the difference very convincingly). This is an interesting although sad exploration of the topic. The second chapter of interest to me in this book is “The Daughter’s Club: Does Emma Woodhouse’s Father Suffer from ‘Dementia’?” Emma is, of course, Jane Austen’s “Emma.” Gullette points out that scholars have focused on Emma’s pride, immaturity, flightiness, misguided meddling, and love story, but have paid little attention to her dilemma (which is, with great good fortune, resolved at the end): her father suffers from great mental and emotional limitations, which Emma and Austen herself seek to minimize by treating them as endearing eccentricities, and by emphasizing what a kind, generous man he is. But Gullette argues that Mr. Woodhouse's limitations are actually signs of dementia, which will only get worse. Emma is well aware that her daughterly duty is to care for him as he declines, until he dies. She loves him dearly, does not shirk from the task, and is unfailingly kind to and patient with him, but it is a heavy burden for a very young woman; in addition, she realizes that this duty may preclude her marrying and having her own family. Only the great goodness of Knightley in agreeing to take the very unusual step of leaving his own estate and moving into the Woodhouse home solves the issue of how Emma can care for her father and still have a marriage and family herself. But still, all is not unalloyed happiness; Gullette points out that Austen shows us almost nothing of what happens after the wedding, as she -- Austen -- is well aware that Emma and Knightley will have a difficult time caring for Mr. Woodhouse as his dementia increases. This intriguing and original interpretation of the story puts Emma in a much better and more mature light than usual, and I found it sad but very compelling.

"Maine," by J. Courtney Sullivan

I have written before about books that are something between “beach novels”/”chick lit” and literary fiction. “Maine” (Knopf, 2011), by J. Courtney Sullivan, seems to fit this in-between category, as did Sullivan’s earlier novel, “Commencement,” which I enjoyed. “Maine” is about a Boston-based Irish Catholic family with a summer home in Maine. Come to think of it, within the past couple of weeks I have written about one book on a Boston-based Irish Catholic family and another book with a family summer house in Maine…interesting coincidences. (And a book I am reading now has a blurb on the back from Sullivan…but that is a post for another day….) I am always drawn to novels about New England vacation retreats. However, “Maine” left me a bit dissatisfied. I am not sure exactly why, but here are some possible reasons:
1. Too small a proportion of this nearly-400-page novel is actually set at the Maine cottage. Like a bored child in the backseat of a car, I kept wanting to ask the author, “Are we there yet? Are we there NOW?”
2. The back story takes too long; the novel seemed to have a lot of prologue and too little current action. It is not just that there is a back story, or history, which is common in novels and can be done well, but that it always seems to be interrupting, stuttering its way into the current story, and not necessarily smoothly.
3. Fictional dysfunctional families can be interesting; this novel, however, seems to be trying to describe a dysfunctional family, but ends up portraying a family more pathetic and annoying and sometimes nasty than truly dysfunctional. You wouldn’t want to spend much time with these characters.
4. And speaking of nasty: Alice, the matriarch of the family, is miserable, rigid, mean, judgmental, and racist. Yes, there is a back story about a tragedy that happened early in her life, but this doesn’t justify her mean-spiritedness and her cruelty to her own family members. Guilt, yes; cruelty, no. Perhaps this is a realistic “type,” but she is hard to tolerate. The family tiptoes around her, but we don't have to. And yes, I know, you don’t have to LIKE the characters in novels, if there is a reason that they are the way they are, but this one is gratuitously, pointlessly petty and mean.
If “Maine” were better written, maybe my objections would be less salient. As it is, the novel is fine, not a bad read, but not very good either.

Lost Worlds

On 4/8/10, I wrote about “book flashes,” the way in which odd bits and pieces of the many books I have read over many years sometimes suddenly and unpredictably flash through my head. In that post and in my 2/24/10 post on "books remembered and forgotten," I celebrated those strange but good occurrences. But there is another side to that experience: sometimes I feel sad about all the worlds I’ve inhabited for a few hours each, the worlds encompassed in the books I have read, worlds of which I can remember and/or revisit only a small part. Those worlds were so intensely felt for a few hours, and then they drifted into the vast inchoate mass of my fallible and inadequate memory. Of course I don’t believe they have all completely disappeared, and fortunately the best, the most impressive, the most powerful plots and characters and themes still usually stay with me, even if they are a little blurry around the edges. But what about all the others?

"Letters Never Sent," by Ruth E. Van Reken

Some of you may know that I was and am a “missionary kid” (MK), the child of missionary parents; I grew up in India. I say “am” because “once an MK, always an MK.” So I am always interested in the stories of other MKs. They usually tell of the adventures they had, and of the big moves their families made between their home countries and the countries where their parents worked. Most MKs write or speak positively about all this, but most also acknowledge that at times it was difficult and lonely. I recently re-read one such story by Ruth E. Van Reken. Written in the form of letters that express the author’s feelings about her experiences as she looks back on them, this book is titled “Letters Never Sent: One Woman’s Journey from Hurt to Wholeness” (“Letters,” 1988). This volume is certainly compelling, especially for those of us who have had similar experiences. But in major ways, it does not resonate with my experiences. The author’s main theme is that the long separations from her parents brought about by her education far away from them, first in boarding school and later living with relatives, left her with lifelong scars and feelings of deprivation and hurt. I understand that some MKs felt this, but my own stays at boarding school were a happy time in my life. I loved my parents and missed them, but did not feel sad and deprived. An important point in the book is that each child is different, and is affected differently by such experiences as separations from parents, and thus that parents and schools should be aware of these differences and act accordingly. Fortunately, Van Reken was eventually able to heal from her childhood experiences.