The Stories of John Cheever

Cheever arranged the volume roughly by order of composition rather than by geography or theme, so that watching the suburban comedies of the 1950s curdle into the darker, stranger fables of the 1970s becomes part of what reading it straight through actually does to a reader.

'The Enormous Radio' gives the volume its clearest device: Jim and Irene Westcott's new radio starts picking up their neighbors' private conversations through the building's wiring, and Irene's growing addiction to overhearing other apartments' misery lets Cheever strip the whole building's respectable surface away floor by floor, right up until the radio is repaired and Irene has to hear, at last, exactly what her own husband thinks of her.

'The Swimmer' turns an ordinary suburban afternoon into a mock-heroic journey: Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the county by way of every neighbor's pool in sequence, treating the route as a private river with a name he's invented, only to discover, pool by pool, that the season, his friendships, and his own finances have quietly moved on without him, arriving home at last to a locked, empty house.

'The Country Husband' escalates the same suburban unraveling into near farce: Francis Weed survives an emergency plane landing that no one at home has any interest in hearing about, then spirals into an obsession with the teenage babysitter next door, until a psychiatrist's unglamorous prescription, take up woodworking, quietly restores him, Cheever's own deflating punchline on a catastrophe he's spent the whole story building up.

The Westcotts' radio never becomes a science-fiction device; Cheever keeps it mundane on purpose, a household appliance that happens to let one apartment hear every other apartment's fights, confessions, and lies, so that the fantastical premise ends up exposing something entirely ordinary: how much misery a thin wall is usually enough to hide.

Cheever compresses an entire autumn into a single afternoon's swim, so that the leaves changing, the water turning cold, and Neddy's neighbors growing steadily less welcoming register less like weather than like time itself accelerating around a man too proud to notice how much of his life he has already spent.