A prodigious feat of research that required processing thousands of unpublished pages and coaxing testimony out of reluctant witnesses, Bailey’s exhaustive account fills more than 700 pages. Blake Bailey argues that even Cheever’s most acclaimed novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are constructed as story sequences, and he describes how “The Swimmer” succeeds precisely because its author abandoned his initial plans to make it a novel.īailey, whose biography of another chronicler of suburban angst, Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty, was an NBCC finalist in 2004, offers an ancestors-to-afterlife, kitchen-sink biography of an heir to the Yankee Protestant descendancy whose kitchen was littered with empty gin bottles. “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken,” he confided in a letter. Yet to his mind, the long form was the summit of literary achievement, and, not adept at constructing plots, he struggled to write novels. The Stories of John Cheever won the 1979 NBCC award for fiction.
Assigned to storm Utah Beach on D-Day, most of the soldiers he had trained with eventually died in combat.Ī handful of Cheever stories, including “The Swimmer,” “The Five Forty-Eight,” “The Country Husband,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” and “The Enormous Radio,” seem indelibly etched into the canon of American literature. On the strength of a collection of short stories, The Way Some People Live, that he himself considered so wretched he tried to destroy all copies of it, Cheever was mustered out of the 22nd Infantry Regiment and into writing fiction for the Army-Navy Screen Magazine in Queens. Writing fiction saved John Cheever’s life. Kellman discusses biography finalist Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life (Knopf) Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists.
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