The St. Botolphs of Cheever's early stories and the upscale, Westchester-like towns - Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park - of his later work find their complex companions in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and John Updike's Rabbit's world. Cheever laid out the pa...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Bibliographische Detailangaben

1. Verfasser:	Meanor, Patrick (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Buch
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	New York Twayne u.a. 1995
Schriftenreihe:	Twayne's United States authors series 647
Schlagworte:	Cheever, John - Critique et interprétation Cheever, John <1912-1982> - Criticism and interpretation Cheever, John > Criticism and interpretation Cheever, John > 1912-1982
Zusammenfassung:	The St. Botolphs of Cheever's early stories and the upscale, Westchester-like towns - Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park - of his later work find their complex companions in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and John Updike's Rabbit's world. Cheever laid out the parameters of this creative world in his very first published story, "Expelled," which appeared in the New Republic in 1930 when Cheever was only 18. The young protagonist of this autobiographical story would be the first of many Cheever heroes to fall from what Meanor describes as "a condition of Edenic happiness and childlike innocence into the chaos and pain of adult knowledge." Moses Wapshot of Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1958), Neddy Merrill of the critically acclaimed short story "The Swimmer" (1964), and even Zeke Farragut of Cheever's novel of redemption, Falconer (1977), struggle to reclaim some remnant of an earlier, lost happiness. Loneliness, fear of aging, family disintegration, alcoholic obsessiveness, sexual desperation, the threat of financial ruin, and a reliance on illusion form the dark core of Cheever's work, creative transformations of some of the themes that dominated his life. Throughout this volume Meanor distinguishes the autobiographical strains in the fiction by drawing from Cheever's documents of his struggles - especially with alcoholism and bisexuality - in The Letters of John Cheever (1988) and The Journals of John Cheever (1991). Meanor fleshes out both biblical and mythological motifs in the stories and the novels; his study is perhaps the first to treat the possible symbolic interpretations of names of characters and places so thoroughly. Burdened by a biblical sense of shame and guilt, Cheever's characters find fleeting, life-giving moments of psychological release "in the celebratory paganism of Greek and Roman myth," Meanor writes, in love, passion, the pleasures of the body.
Beschreibung:	XX, 205 S. Ill.
ISBN:	0805739998