The Stories of John Cheever
Won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award simultaneously, one of the few story collections to achieve both. Cheever's suburban America (the cocktails, the affairs, the swimming pools, the despair beneath the surface) is both a specific time and a permanent condition.
Read straight through, the same move repeats: a full life history of an upper-middle-class New Yorker, then a reveal of misery underneath the comfort, until the pattern shows well before the book's 700 pages and 61 stories run out. Readers without old-money backgrounds struggle to care, dismissing the cast as “well off people undergoing well off people problems,” and one reviewer is blunter still, calling the whole enterprise “upper class wank.” A common complaint sits at the sentence level: skilled prose paired with “no hook or plot line to pull me along,” characters who mope rather than act. A critic admits that for all the reputation, “the supposed genius never quite connects on the page.” Some readers also flag the treatment of women as dated, and more than one reports quitting a couple hundred pages in, skipping to The Swimmer and abandoning the rest.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
