Edmund White explores them in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Despite reading scores of words about Cheever in wake of Blake Bailey's biography being published, I seem to never saturate--a good thing, because I have still yet to pick up Bailey's much-praised book. I am always curious about this curious man and astounding writer. Especially of interest in this new piece is White's comparison of the vitality of Cheever's fiction with the malaise and sadness of his life:
The exuberance and humor and charm and energy of Cheever's fiction constitute a powerful and heroic incantation to ward off the unrelenting bad luck of his life. ... What was it that allowed him to transform all this dullness into art? My own answer may sound trivializing but I would say it was his knack for writing seductively about the world of the senses—its colors and associations, its sexiness and its smells (above all, its smells!), not to mention its suave beauty, at once transitory and eternal in a way that Wallace Stevens understood in that paradoxical line of "Peter Quince at the Clavier": "The body dies; the body's beauty lives."
Comments