Volume 25, Number 17 · November 9, 1978
Light Touch
By Robert Towers
The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever
Knopf, 693 pp., $15.00
For years many of us have gone around with bits and pieces of John Cheever stories lodged in our minds—oddities of character or situation, brief encounters, barely remembered passages of special poignancy or beauty. But unless we have had access to a complete file of old New Yorkers or were provident enough to buy the collections of stories as they appeared, we have lacked a context for these fragments. A few stories ('Torch Song,' 'The Swimmer') have been widely anthologized, while the rest have remained in a kind of literary limbo: valued in recollection, known to exist, but difficult to reach. Though Cheever has been among the handful of contemporary writers who have sharpened our awareness and added to our arsenal of allusion, the individual volumes of his stories have been hard to come by, even in ordinarily well-stocked libraries. The success of Falconer has changed all that. Now we have this fat and weighty volume—sixty-one stories in all—and it comes like a splendid gift.
Review, 2747 words
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