But this is not the worst of it. The worst of it is Jones’s sense of fiction’s relationship with the real world. The real world—as it pertains to Cheever, as far as Jones is concerned–is New York’s Westchester County, where Cheever lived and where Jones lives. This latter fact—that Jones lives in Westchester County, the real one–is significant because it establishes Jones’s bona fides, because Jones believes it gives him authority when he writes, “When I tell people where I live, they often say, ‘Oh, Cheever country.’ I just nod, because the truth would take too long. The short version is no, I don’t, because Cheever country doesn’t exist any longer.” Forget, for the moment, that Jones has already claimed that Cheever doesn’t really matter anymore, even though he then admits that people immediately associate a part of New York State with him. Forget, for the moment, the nauseatingly world-weary tone of the local authority who has to yet again tell readers not to confuse fact with fiction, even though this local authority is supposed to be a book critic whose life is enriched by those who complicate the distinction between fact and fiction. No, what’s especially infuriating and disheartening about all this is Jones’s subsequent claim that, “For that matter, the world Cheever describes may never have existed quite as he wrote about it,” and then goes on to show how the men who populated Cheever’s stories—wealthy commuters–were not really like Cheever—who was not wealthy or a commuter–at all. To this, the sensitive—perhaps over-sensitive–reader is allowed to respond in this fashion: What? Is this not the point of fiction: not to replicate the world, but to create a distorted version of the world by which readers can be entertained, transformed, provoked, educated in a way they cannot do with the real world because they are too busy living in it? Is this not the fundamental purpose and premise of fiction, no matter what kind of fiction? It is tempting to blame Bailey’s biography for all this: because clearly Jones has read Cheever’s fiction as the biographical information has compelled him to, instead of reading the fiction as fiction. But no: that is not Bailey’s fault. It is not Bailey’s fault when Jones complains that in his fiction Cheever “drags [his characters] through the mud because mud is all he knows.” There is mud: Bailey’s biography makes that clear; one knows that without having to read the biography itself. But it is Jones’s fault that he sees the mud in Bailey’s biography, in Cheever’s life, and superimposes it on Cheever’s fiction–where there is also mud, for sure, but, to overwork the metaphor, it exists primarily so that out of it something surprising and beautiful might grow. Jones, unforgivably, ignores this fact. Because it is a fact. It is a fact because I say it’s one: because I’ve read the stories and not the biography, and I can see the proper function of mud in Cheever’s fiction, and Jones has read the fiction and the biography and cannot, evidently. Later on, Jones tells us “Cheever is and is not a great writer.” But given what comes before this (confusing) proclamation, it is impossible to trust Jones’s literary judgment at all. The smart reader is tempted to run away screaming away from Jones. And while the smart reader is running, the smart reader might be tempted to run—not to Bailey’s biography, at least not at first, but back to Cheever, or to Cheever for the first time, to see what all the fuss is about. And the smart reader should give in to that temptation.

It is a thrill to re-read Cheever’s work—no less a thrill the twentieth time than the second. But how I envy the first time reader of Cheever! Especially the first-time reader of Cheever who has some vague, dismissive sense of him as a bard of the suburban upper middle class, the quaint scribe for the post-war New Yorker set. What a treat to discover the formal variety of Cheever’s fiction: the allegory, the fable, domestic realism, bildungsroman, metafiction, the ghost story, and best of all, all or some of these forms within the same story, the same novel. What an eye-opener when you come to his work expecting only Westchester County and also get New England, Italy, Egypt, and maximum security penitentiaries. What a feeling when you do get Westchester County and expect to find quaintness and instead find in, say, “O Youth and Beauty!” the story of a former high school athlete and drunken hurdler of furniture shot by his wife in midair. What a moment, when you encounter the brutal, pitiless matter-of-fact last lines of that story—“The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead”—and then try to reconcile that with the mostly un-ironic celebration and lament of the life that lead to the shooting just a half page earlier (“Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those postmortems and pickup summers!”) What a moment, when you realize that this disorientation and these mixed feelings are precisely the point—not just of Cheever’s fiction but perhaps of any fiction. What an epiphany when the reader realizes that there is no quaintness in the world of the story, that the only quaintness in the story is the quaintness you, the reader, brought with you, the quaintness the story kills off without killing off you, its carrier. What a feeling to have your all preconceptions proved so wrong!

What a disappointment, then, to not be able to talk about all the fiction—the best stories (“Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well,” “The Jewels of the Cabots,” “The Seaside Houses,” “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” “The Country Husband,” The Swimmer,” “The Scarlet Moving Van”); the strangest, most beautiful novel (Bullet Park); the fondest, most loving novel (The Wapshot Chronicle). But there is too much great fiction, and one must focus on one thing in order give one a chance to do all of it justice, and so I’ll focus on “The Cure.” “The Cure” is Cheever’s greatest story, which is to say it’s my favorite, that it’s meant the most to me a reader and a writer (to the point where I’ve echoed its ending in one of my own stories—by “echoed” I mean aped–just as I’ve echoed his use of exclamation points in this essay). Jones claims that Cheever is “a great and not a great writer.” I have no idea what he means by that. But this is what I mean when I say something is great: I mean not that it’s objectively great, but that I love it best. And “The Cure” is Cheever’s greatest story. That is yet another fact.

“The Cure” is what one might call—with derision or pleasure, depending upon the “one”–a typical Cheever story. Its narrator is a white businessman; he lives in the suburbs and commutes (by train) into the city; he has marital problems; he drinks too much. Those are the details, not the facts, of the story—“details” being the things you need to mention and get out of the way before moving on to what really matters in the story, which begins like so: “This happened in the summer.”

I’ve read this story dozens of times, and I confess: I still get the chills from this simplest, most artful of sentences. The promise of doom in the “this,” the knowledge that something has “happened” and yet we don’t yet know what it is, the comfort of knowing that whatever “this” is, it will, in some fashion, be over by the end of the season. In other words, the first sentence makes promises, so that the reader will read on to see if the rest of the story can deliver what’s been promised. Onto the rest of the first paragraph, then, in which we learn that the narrator’s wife, Rachel, and their three children have left him, that this is not the first time they’ve left him, that the narrator assumes this separation is final, and that he’s not entirely sorry about it: “She had left me twice before…and I watched her go each time with a feeling that was far from happy, but also with that renewal of self-respect, of nerve, that seems to be the reward for accepting a painful truth.” The narrator then tells us he’s glad it’s summer, because “it seemed to spare us both the immediate necessity of legalizing our separation…I guessed that she was content, as I was, to let things ride until September or October.”

I love the false sense of contentedness here, the feeling of self-congratulation, the cheery notion that divorce, like medicine, might be distasteful but will eventually end up making you feel better. But I love most that the attentive reader knows that while the narrator and Rachel might be content to “let things ride,” Cheever is not. We know this because in the second paragraph there are already “a few minor symptoms of domestic disorder”: namely, the cat and dog run away and the maid gets drunk, tells the narrator that her husband has left her: “She wept. She got down on her knees. That scene, with the two of us alone in a house unnaturally empty of women and children on a summer evening, was grotesque, and it is this kind of grotesqueness, I know, that can destroy your resolution.”

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