Coda

By Paul Gray

OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS by John Cheever Knopf; 100 pages; $10

This is Author John Cheever's first new book since the novel Falconer (1977). In the interim came The Stories of John Cheever (1978), an elegant anthology of some of the best American short fiction written this century. It was justifiably praised and prized; it also became a bestseller, which collections of stories are not supposed to do. Having summed up one strand of his career, and facing a considerably enlarged circle of admirers, the author was left with some money, acclaim and a very hard act to follow.

Cheever, 69, has sensibly not tried to top himself. Oh What a Paradise It Seems stakes out neutral territory. Too long to be a story and too short to be a novel, it seems instead a coda to other works, a spontaneous riff on some people, places and things that have appeared elsewhere in Cheever's fiction. The hero could be (but is not) one of those stubborn old Yankee Wapshots. The settings range from New York City to a declining country village, with the hint of suburban Bullet Parks and Shady Hills sprawling in between. And the plot is a Cheeverian amalgam of unexpected violence and grace.

Lemuel Sears is "old enough to remember when the horizons of his country were dominated by the beautiful and lachrymose wineglass elm tree and when most of the bathtubs one stepped into had lions' claws." From his comfortable apartment on Manhattan's East Side, he regards contemporary life with as much equanimity as his traditional tastes and Protestant values will allow. But when a pond in his daughter's village is rezoned for dumping, ruining his weekend ice skating, Sears gets mad. He hires an environmentalist to fight the despoliation. He also, unexpectedly, begins an affair with an attractive younger woman he meets in a bank.

Can Sears rejuvenate both a rustic pond and himself? Before these questions are answered, a number of odd events occur: a beloved family dog is shot through the heart; Sears' ally in the pollution case is wiped out, gangland style; an infant is accidentally abandoned by the side of a highway; Sears stumbles into a brief and mystifying homosexual tryst. Amid all this activity, Cheever's attention regularly shifts to other matters. A scene in a supermarket veers into a meditation on the historical importance of commerce: "It is because our fortresses were meant to be impregnable that the fortresses of the ancient world have outlasted the marketplaces of the past, leaving the impression that fear and bellicosity were the keystones of our earliest communities, when in fact those crossroads where men met to barter fish for baskets, greens for meat and gold for brides were the places where we first grew to know and communicate with one another." When Sears encounters a fast-food outlet, he checks his urge to scoff with a digression on the role that fried food has played in the development of civilization.

Like his hero, Cheever wants to believe that life is not being systematically brutalized and defaced, that there is nothing new under the sun that cannot be traced to some ancient, honorable rite. It would, unfortunately, take a much longer book than this to make such a case, much less transcribe it into a persuasive narrative. Readers new to Cheever are likely to find Oh What a Paradise It Seems fragmentary, preachy and thin. But the book is illuminated by its past; it assumes significance from the history of splendid fiction that Cheever has given it and everyone. --By Paul Gray

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