One Man's Hell

SOME PEOPLE, PLACES, & THINGS THAT WILL NOT APPEAR IN MY NEXT NOVEL (175 pp.)--John Cheever--Harper ($3.50).

About six months ago, Author John (The Wapshot Chronicle) Cheever announced publicly that "life in the U.S. in 1960 is hell." Since hell is a private estate, it might be supposed that he could have been speaking merely for himself. But his scores of short stories and now this book of new ones prove plainly, of course, that he was speaking as well for his not-so-fictional characters. The hell he has staked out for them is by now unmistakably Cheever country (nice house, nice income, nice wife, nice kids, all of it tasting of despair and a thick tongue the morning after). But only rarely is there a true hellion to be found there. There are, rather, middleclass, earthly sufferers whose jobs are as uncertain or as unsatisfying as their moral underpinnings, their visions of goodness constantly clouded by the more intolerable vision of the sad ending that must overtake them and their neighbors.

Some People, Places, & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel could easily turn out to be a misnomer. If the title is accurate, it would be good news, for Author Cheever is in danger of getting bogged down in his talent-lined rut. He promises in the future to drop "all lushes," but The Scarlet Moving Van is the story of the handsome All-America football star who is so frightened by life that he turns to the jug and throws away the stopper. His Brimmer is another charming lush whose great wastes of emptiness can be filled in only with the help of alcohol and indiscriminate sex. Typically they are men with much in them that is good, and Author Cheever registers their fright and decline with delicate ruefulness and in writing that is unfailingly readable. But how they got that way is something that he too casually skirts.

The Death of Justina is a more explicit try at sketching a corner of hell in suburban U.S. His wife's elderly cousin dies in the narrator's house, but the town is so carefully zoned that in his neighborhood there are no undertakers and none are permitted to come from outside to pick her up. The only solution, his doctor tells him, is to take her across the zoning line in his car. But Justina's death is merely the incident that fires the smoldering discontent of a man whose daily stint is to commute to the city and turn out TV commercials. Cheever is almost surely speaking for himself when his frustrated adman says: "There are some Americans who, although their fathers emigrated from the Old World three centuries ago, never seem to have quite completed the voyage, and I am one of these."

Abroad, Cheever seems to find a new freedom; the three stories about Italy have the charm and knowingness that come only to a writer who has thrown away the guidebook. But hell, at least Cheever's hell, is ever waiting just around the corner. In The Golden Age, the U.S. "situation-comedy" writer has come to Italy to try to forget that he is one. Somewhat guiltily he tries to create the impression that he is a poet--but poetic justice triumphs. Up to his rented castle comes a delegation headed by the mayor. They have just seen an episode of The Best Family, and they have been moved. Says the mayor: "Oh, we thought, Signore, that you were merely a poet."

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