BOOKS
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Cheever's pa rticula r focus. For a ll the richness of incident, each a ffa ir,
each fru stra tio n , each hero is a.varia tion on ano ther. Some times who le
drama tic situa tions a re virtual contrac tio ns or ex ten sions of one
ano ther, as in 'The Music Teacher" a nd "The Country Husband";
sometimes mirror images, as in "The Cure" and "The H ousebreaker of
Shady Hill. " In fac t, cha rac ter a nd scene a like a re memorable less for
themse lves than for the pa rticul ar ang le o f vision they prov ide on a
world they behold in common .
T he mora l coro ll ary, o f course, is tha t Cheever's charac ters are the
decided instruments o f circumstance, unable and unwilling no t onl y to
act but even to reac t, whe ther to a pa thetic riva l in "The Season o f
Divorce," or to the regula r p rovoca tion o f a burned dinner a nd a sour
wife in "The Mu sic Teacher. " One o f the mos t irrita ting examples in
all of the
S tories
comes a t the sta rt o f "The Country Husband," when
Francis Weed returns to Shady Hill dazed and ba ttered by a near
calamitous crash la nding o n a fli ght home to Idlewild from a business
trip. When the exhausted Weed tries to tell his brawling kids and
distracted wife about it, no one even hears him-the husba nd and
fa ther, a las, vic timized by the very ho useho ld he has crea ted. But what
looks like a refusa l to engage mora l ques tion s by retrea ting into the
fa n tas tic turns out to be an a ttempt to de termine wha t is dec isive in the
forma tion o f charac ter and wha t is no t.
Even "The Eno rmo us Radio" ho lds a more p roblema tic meaning
than its ra ther wea k mora l pa tina sugges ts. Though Jim a nd Irene
Wesco tt have bought a new radio for the pleasure of listening to music,
the mys terio us machine forces them instead to listen in on the sad and
sometimes bruta l priva te lives o f their neighbors, and a ppears to jo lt
them bo th into the discovery o f pass ions and pains of their own . Wha t
is shocking about the sto ry's fina l scene, however, is no t the substance
of Irene's sudden mora l a ttack on her husband fo r his pas t sin s, but tha t
the imperturba ble and virtua ll y bla nk Irene (a t the sta rt o f the tale she
has "a wide, fine fo rehead upon which no thing a t a ll had been
written ") has suddenl y acquired the abusive rhetoric o f intimacy from
overhearing the lives o f o thers.
Hence the energy o f plo t in a Cheever story lies less with wha t we
think of as the customa ry driving force o f sho rt fi c tion-the mora l
dilemma, the emo tiona l tensio n o f a conflict to be pressured or
reso lved-and more with engaging the reader in a wish to uncoil the
enigma tic struc ture o f mo ti va tion and desire, to track down the orig ins
of identity th rough the names and images tha t determine it. T his is the
privileged o bsess io n o f Cha rlie Mallory in "The Geome try of Love,"
