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PARTISAN REVIEW
the blame for their indecision and frustration away from the author.
We assign it instead to the world of WASP custom that Cheever renders
with such sympathy and exactitude in his early portraits of prewar
Manhattan, and, later on, in his sketches of the disguised Westches ter
suburb known in his fiction as Shady Hill. More abused than abusive,
the usual Cheever hero tends to be, like Ralph Whittemore in "The Pot
of Gold," a "prisoner of his schemes and expectations"; the unsuspect–
ing and ironic casualty of his single decisive conviction in life, "an
uncompromising loyalty," as Cheever puts it, "to the gentle manners
of the middle class."
As a result, we can attribute the loneliness of the Cheever hero toa
world of conventions no longer adequate to experience but still
impossible to break away from (a " rigid script," as Cheever calls it in
"Metamorphoses"). Such a reading shores up our sense of the Cheever
hero as the hapless or pathetic victim, different in tone from the victim
in Jewish fiction perhaps, but sti ll consistent with the approved
modernist hero at odds, like Conrad's isolatoes, with a world of
received customs and beliefs.
The first rea l a ttempt to canonize Cheever came with the publica–
tion of
Falconer
in 1977, for
Falconer
seemed, on the face of it at leas t,
to place Cheever securely in the kind of modern tradition that justifies
inaction as an indictment of society; that exp loits, in short, the familiar
figure of the prison to express the way cu lture captures and confines
the self. But if Falconer prison was the key to Cheever's triumph, it was
not so much because it served a vision of modern life as a life of
imprisonment and isolation, but because Cheever used it to measure
confinement as our ruling notion about ourse lves. A metaphor about a
metaphor rather than a metaphor about life, Cheever's prison sug–
gested that the rea l function of confinement was to produce, as its
necessary yield and support, the notion of freedom.
If
we inquire into the arguments and architecture of the
Stories,
here, too, we will find a very different kind of drama from the Christian
and modernist one that supposed ly liberates and resurrects Farragut as
he emerges from a shroud outside Falconer's walls. There is, after all,
no overwhelming burden or hypocrisy in the confinements that the
quotidian world places on Cheever's characters in the
Stories
(imagine
Ned Merrill in "The Swimmer" making his neighborly rounds with–
out the obligatory drinks he takes at each house along his way), for it is
a drama of accommodation to the duties of daily life that is being
played out.
It is probably even inaccurate to say that character in itself is
